


spiderwebs

by booooin



Series: yugioh canon [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga), Yu-Gi-Oh! Series
Genre: BDSM, Bakura comes back, Emotional Constipation, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape/Non-con Elements, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2019-10-05 20:17:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17331656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/booooin/pseuds/booooin
Summary: Bakura comes back, Malik and Ryou are dating. Malik freaks out.Post-canon but a different, though related, headcanon than dreamkeeper.





	1. our boyfriend is dead but isn’t he?

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I actually started writing this as a light and happy fic but something happened...  
> The characterizations are related to my last canon fic, but some of the events changed for me so this is a different universe.
> 
> Welcome to another Yugioh fanfic where they don’t play Duel Monsters at all :)

Malik, anachronistic child of diaspora, remembered yellowed cats stringed to gray and red stools, dust, and the chilly scent of hot cooking oil. He leaned and saw Tokyo skyscrapers, LCD advertisements, and scrubbed pavement. He was smoking a Japanese cigarette—expensive. Ryou’s apartment was expensive, centrally located, and rising in value every six months. He’d paid it off just last year.

They’d been dating for a few years now. Neither of them kept track, really. 

Sometime after Domino, after the whole mess, they ran into each other in Tokyo. At the time, Anzu was still around and Malik vaguely remembered that they’d somehow connected through her. Ryou was the same—cold and intimidating. Malik remembered how he’d always been just a little afraid of him, of what was really there behind Bakura’s obnoxious brand of crazy.

He hadn’t seemed surprised to see Malik at all. Didn’t talk to him the whole night. Just smiled that startled, polite smile whenever someone thought to speak to him. Eventually and inevitably, Malik went to him.

“I’m sorry—” Malik remembered trying to say at one point, and then finishing it off with “I wish we got to know each other a little better back then” like a coward.

Ryou had held him in his gaze. “Oh?” He’d said and Malik realized he had him pinned down all wrong, that there was a reason the thief king had been paired off with him, that there was a don’t-fuck-with-me strength there with that strange invisibility that had Malik completely off center in just one syllable. 

They ended up taking a car together, even though Malik technically had ridden his bike to the restaurant, and when Ryou asked him for his address he didn’t want to say.

“Let me see your place,” he’d said and realized immediately that it sounded crazy. They didn’t know each other. Malik had fucked around with his soul parasite but that was the extent of their relationship. They hadn’t flirted at the bar, or in the car, or even had a civil conversation that Ryou seemed remotely interested in.

Ryou didn’t bat an eye.

Later, when they were kissing, Ryou smiled with the corner of one mouth up and what Malik would later recognize as Ryou’s own flavor of quiet cruelty in his eyes. “Are you doing this because you miss him?” He asked and that was the first time Malik remembered this was the same body he’d battled against and yielded to all those years ago. What could he say to that? This body was his first love and there wasn’t anyone in the room who didn’t know it.

“No,” he said and winced because it sounded defensive.

“Hm,” said Ryou, apathy in his every gesture as he tugged Malik’s shirt off. “Because that’s why I’m doing this.”

It got better after that. Their relationship wouldn’t have lasted if it had stayed that toxic. Eventually, Malik learned what it felt like to make Ryou smile for his own sake, that he loved to be touched when he was upset, and the way he disliked vague language because he saw it as irresponsible. When he looked at Ryou he didn’t imagine what he looked like with a deranged grin and bloody knife anymore but saw him as he was, messy bun on his head, shoulders broader than they first seemed, and smile cutting into his cheek when he shielded himself with self deprecating humor. Ryou was a whole person, not Bakura and with nothing Bakura about him, an intensely shielded and beautiful person who could say the most cutting things in arguments and never cried.

They moved in together when it felt like it made sense. Malik got used to having a boyfriend, one who was fully human, his same age, and of another, but not strange, culture. They kept talking about traveling together but Ryou was always held up by one project or another at work.

It was normal, and that was really good for Malik’s schizoaffective disorder because that meant there were days when he could pretend that it wasn’t there. And that was what recovery, Malik supposed, was supposed to be.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A week after Ryou’s birthday, which they celebrated at 2 AM when Ryou got off from work with a store bought cake and tea Ryou only tried and didn’t drink, Ryou opened his eyes and asked, “Did you say something?”

It was 6:30 AM and Malik was barely awake. “Huh?”

If he had opened his eyes, maybe he would have seen the expression on Ryou’s face. “Never mind.” Malik did open his eyes then. The dawn was blue against their sheets and if they were in Egypt, they would have heard the birds. Malik leaned against Ryou in bed instead of missing them and home. “I could suck you off before you have to leave,” he whispered in Ryou’s ear because he loved watching him laugh.

“You’re so fucking corny,” Ryou said but he looked happier than the moment before so Malik climbed on top of him.

“Hold still, you have a pimple.”

“Don’t pop it!” 

When they got like this, it was good. This was good and comfortable, when Ryou was laughing and Malik felt light and this was easy, just so easy. They could do this until the moment one of them died. 

Malik didn’t know why he asked it at that moment. “Do I make you happy?”

Ryou became instantly guarded. He lifted his eyebrows. “What?”

It was enough to fluster anyone. “I mean,” and Malik really didn’t want to be that guy, he didn’t. It was the mental illness making him paranoid that everyone secretly hated him and was plotting to cut him out of their lives once and for all for the crimes he was responsible for only in his head. Or maybe it was just regular old insecurity. “It just feels like, all the time, I’m trying to figure out what will make you happy, how to get you to like me more. It’s like a game but one that I can’t win. One point for a joke there, another for remembering this and that...Do you ever feel like that about me?”

He really shouldn’t have asked it, not that morning or any morning for that matter. Things had been easy and good. 

“It’s too early for this,” Ryou said and it sounded like ice, even though Malik knew him well enough to tell that he had said it as lovingly as possible. The conversation, like so many of Malik’s passion projects that his therapist said he should really try to finish because it would raise his self esteem to do it, lay on the floor unfurled waiting for someone to put it away like a thing forgotten.

 

 

* * *

 

 

That afternoon, about twenty minutes after Malik got home from work and was trying to figure out whether he should wait for Ryou for dinner, there was a knock on the door.

When Malik opened it, there he was, in old looking street wear and red cloak wrapped around him like it hadn’t been more than ten years since he’d been the villain on everyone’s lips. Since he was the villain on Malik’s lips. Malik didn’t recognize him by the body or the face, but by the posture and sneer.

Whatever they may say about him, Bakura always did have attitude.

“How did you get in here?” Was the first stupid thing out of Malik’s mouth. Because this was someone who crept into booby trapped tombs, who knew his way around dark corners and could pull his entire body weight in gold out of a ten foot deep hole. The question wasn’t how he got here, but why he was here, lobby doorman or not.

Bakura wasn’t intimidating. He was fucking terrifying. He remained Malik of manic nights enraged at his own capacity for murder and even more enraged at his guilt complex around murder. Bakura had once threatened to cut Malik’s eye out and then they’d both laughed like it was some kind of joke.

Bakura was supposed to be dead. Malik has grieved for him.

Here he was, brown skinned and scarred, almost familiar even though Malik had never seen him like this before, in a body of his own. And he was still beautiful, more beautiful now that he was in his own skin though Bakura could always make himself home anywhere.

“Snuck out of hell,” the bastard had the nerve to say, slouched over casual like some high school punk ready for detention, “because I missed your pretty face.”

This was wrong. This was the opposite of what Malik needed right now to stay safe, sane, and healthy. This was the devil, clad in red and old gym shoes that looked like they were the wrong size.

“You can’t be here. You have to leave before Ryou sees you.”

At that, Bakura seemed to look very surprised. There was a gulp of silence, and Malik sensed that he should have been trying to read something into it but the thing was, he didn’t know what to glean from it. “I’m just here for the Ring,” Bakura said but something seemed off. He was looking off center and his smirk had fallen off.

It felt like a bluff and Malik let it slide off easy. Here was a man asking for a ghost’s things. “I think it’s with the others. In Egypt,” Malik said and he could have gotten whiplash from how quickly Bakura turned around to leave just then. “ _Wait_ ,” Malik heard himself say and didn’t know how or why but he’d reached out and gotten a hold of the back of Bakura’s shirt. The body underneath was warm. _Warm_.

They both froze, unable to move.

“Sorry,” Malik finally said. “You should come in. Sorry,” he said again, like Bakura was a real person.

When they were inside, sitting, like two normal people and not partners in crime like when Malik was a literally crazy teenager and Bakura was a 3000 year old spirit trapped in a horcrux, Malik made tea to keep his hands busy. Here he was, getting ready to have tea with Satan, like he was a guest in his house. Ryou’s house.

“This is your place?” And this was ridiculous too, Bakura sounding impressed because he didn’t live in the twenty-first century. He lived in 1000 BC Egypt and he didn’t live anywhere because he was _dead._

“Ours. Me and Ryou’s,” Malik said by habit like Ryou told him to say even though it wasn’t true. This was all Ryou’s because there was no way he could afford to live here on a bike mechanic’s pay.

“Okay,” said Bakura, shrugging. “So, you and him?” He made two fists and brought his wriggling thumbs together in a suggestive gesture. 

That was the question Malik had been holding his breath for, because Bakura asking this question made him remember what Ryou had said to him about missing Bakura that first night. But this, too, was ridiculous because they had been dating for somewhere around four years and this was a number Malik only remembered because he was trying to not think about his relationship all day after the humiliation of that morning.

“Well, yes,” Malik said instead of all that.

Bakura didn’t look disturbed. “Huh.”

“So, uh,” Malik began, wanting to demand from Bakura why he was here and not dead like he was supposed to be. As soon as he spoke, a key in the door turned which definitely wasn’t normal because it was only 6 PM and Ryou was never home before 9 PM, usually not before midnight, and sometimes staying the night at the office. But this wasn’t the craziest thing to happen that day.

They watched Ryou come in, which Malik loved to do, because he always looked absent and didn’t notice Malik looking, as he hung up his jacket and checked his pockets for his phone, face still worrying over things that had nothing to do with the world they had created in here.

Ryou didn’t say anything when he saw Bakura but stopped in his tracks, face unreadable. They stared at each other, the Bakuras, like cats.

Then, Ryou walked over to Malik and kissed him on the cheek, ignoring Bakura completely. “Did you eat yet?” 

This too, felt antagonistic because when was the last time Ryou greeted him like they were auditioning for I Love Lucy? And yet here he was, well practiced in the performance.

“Um, no,” said Malik, staring at Bakura.

“I’ll order sushi,” Ryou said and that was weird too, because Ryou never wanted to order sushi because it was too much food for just the two of them and it didn’t keep. Sushi was for special occasions, he always told Malik. But today, Malik realized, was a special occasion. And there were three of them here, even if Ryou hadn’t acknowledged Bakura since he walked in.

Bakura, meanwhile, was grinning like something feral. He was that something feral, out of place everywhere in this city but especially inside of Ryou’s modern condo. Ryou was in the kitchen making a phone call to the closest sushi restaurant when Bakura singsonged under his breath, “ _He’s mad at me_.” Goosebumps lifted hair up along Malik’s entire body. He got up to go check on Ryou just as he walked back in.

“I didn’t get tuna because of the mercury,” Ryou told Malik.

“Right.”

Ryou sat on the floor by Malik’s feet and rested his back against his legs, stretching out like he was very, very tired and had a very, very long day. “So, when did you get in?” He said so lightly that Malik didn’t realize he was talking to Bakura until he looked at him. And the way Ryou looked at him, it was like he didn’t even see him there.

Ryou was fucking pissed and it _showed_.

“He just got here,” Malik said the same moment Bakura said, “a few months ago.”

Ryou didn’t reply.

Malik was sitting there thinking, Bakura had been back for _months_? And he hadn’t knocked on their door until _now_? Had he been back in Domino, spying on Yuugi or somewhere in the bushes on the two of them this whole time?

“Your defenses are up, _yadonushi_ ,” Bakura said and wasn’t that the understatement? Because Ryou’s defenses were always up high, strong, and daunting. “Didn’t you miss me?”

Ryou stayed silent, smiled, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes.

“Nah, it’s cool,” Bakura went on, getting comfortable on the couch. He always used to do this, used to blab on just to fill the time and drive the people around him crazy. “I mean, I’m not exactly a dependable man, am I? Coming and going from this world and the spirit world as I please...So, here’s a good one—I’m sitting there festering in hell, and really festering if you can imagine it, just soul rotting and _everything_ , when something hits me on the head and it’s some Japanese school girl on the street. I find myself on Kabukicho and no one even bats an eye. Can you imagine how I felt when I realized that my dearest _yadonushi_ just so happened to be in the same city?”

“Shut up,” Ryou said evenly. “I asked you when you got here, not for your whole life story.”

This was too much. Malik remembered again that he was terrified of Bakura and of provoking him. Not to mention how he felt about Ryou and how he couldn’t figure out whether he was equally scared of him, just afraid of losing him, or whether this was all just because Malik was a nervous wreck because he never found a medication that worked for him.

Bakura, meanwhile, looked like he was going to swallow them whole but maybe that was just Malik projecting.

“Maybe,” Malik said and tried to not falter when both pairs of brown eyes went directly to him for interrupting their under-the-surface, between-the-lines kind of cat fight or whatever the hell they were doing here, “You two should catch up. I’ll call the place and tell them that I can pick up the sushi.”

If he was looking for someone to ask him to stay, he wasn’t going to get it. “Take my credit card,” Ryou said, leaning forward to let Malik up and eyes set on Bakura. “It’s in my coat pocket.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Once upon a time, Malik had run towards danger whenever he saw it. It symbolized the horizon for him.

Bakura, the idiot, had impressed him with his negligence towards his own body. He’d thrown himself in front of Malik’s bike like he got a thrill out of dying and bled out as a offensive strategy. The first thing that endeared Bakura to Malik was the complete lack of care he gave Ryou.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The whole time trip to the sushi restaurant and back, Malik obsessed over the fact that he had just left his boyfriend alone in a room with a mass murderer without a care in the world, a mass murderer that he himself had sucked off when he was still possessing said boyfriend’s body.

This wasn’t Oedipal messy. This was a psychoanalyst’s nightmare.

When Malik got home, however, the whole vibe of the room had changed. Where there was stark tension, where Ryou was ready to snap and break someone’s neck in half, there was nothing. Ryou was wearing his glasses and doing some work on the computer and Bakura wasn’t even in the living room.

“He’s in the shower,” Ryou said when Malik walked in without even looking up.

The shower, because Bakura had his own body now and did human things like clean it in the shower and feed it with sushi. He had a body, scarred across the face and god knows where else. 

“So, is he staying?”

Ryou looked up then, over his glasses. “Is that alright?”

What could Malik say? Because, really, this wasn’t his apartment and who was he to deny his boyfriend the pleasure of having his childhood nightmare come truly to life keep him company in his home. Malik wasn’t about to lose Ryou over this. He’s been learning how to keep his mouth shut all his life for this moment.

“Of course,” he gulped.

Their dynamic was stranger than anything Malik had ever seen. He didn’t know how he imagined it, maybe with Ryou obedient to Bakura’s every word before he’d gotten to know Ryou. Back when he had a reason to wonder how the two of them functioned within one head, Malik had Ryou pegged as a clear underdog, pure of heart if a little _too_ shy and sweet.

Obviously, that was never the case and, by the time Malik realized how brutal Ryou really was, he never had any reason to think about what his relationship with Bakura was exactly characterized by, because he preferred to keep Bakura out of their conversations for personal reasons.

Bakura fixed Ryou a plate, which he ignored at first. They shared one cup of tea that Ryou kept refilling, Malik noticed. They interacted like an old married couple. They acted like they had shared a body, like bodies could be common property. That was all.

It was domestic, like they fell together and the gaps filled in just like that.

“The couch pulls out into a bed,” Ryou said. “But you’ll have to put it back during the day.”

Bakura had come out smelling like Ryou’s shampoo, which made Malik’s head spin because he had already been distracted by Ryou’s shirt, too tight on Bakura’s chest, and shorts, which were the ones Ryou used to sleep in and pushed to the back of the closet a long time ago. He was reclined on the floor, against the couch where Malik had considered sitting on and decided against.

“You should buy some of your own clothes,” Ryou continued. “If you’re going to be—“ Instead of finishing, he blinked and looked like he’d either just forgotten or remembered something.

If you’re going to be here for a while, was what Ryou meant to say. If you’re going to stay in our lives here, forever. Malik couldn’t go there in his head, not yet.

That was just too much, the possibility of Bakura being a permanent fixture in their home.

“I can give you some money for it,” Ryou said. “Or anything else you need.”

Bakura had his head leaned on his own shoulder and he was looking at Ryou sideways. “I don’t need anything.” It sounded strange because all the fight had left Bakura and he sounded almost tender. Malik was startled by how much he wanted to reach out and touch Bakura, with his eyes looking muted like that, because he’s never seen it before. 

But he wasn’t allowed. Touching Bakura at all, even on the hand, was definitely off limits.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Ryou. “I can provide for you, as long as you’re here.”

And Ryou could, of course he could. He was an venture capitalist and earned the entirety of Malik’s yearly salary every two weeks. He was good at his job and could probably retire into luxury before he hit forty if he wanted to.

“Okay,” said Bakura easily and sat up to clean up the mess on the coffee table with an ease that surprised Malik because he never thought Bakura would be one to do any housework. Bakura wasn’t one for accepting things, least of all help, and he didn’t do things like stack garbage into small containers and rinse plates of soy sauce in the sink but he was doing so now.

When they first began dating, Malik had been surprised at how messy Ryou was. He had seemed so clean and well put together when they were kids. Ryou had been an orphan, de facto, and it didn’t add up that he didn’t know to do basic things like wipe down the stove or scrub the tub every once in a while. Ryou always functioned like he needed someone to take care of him. 

Maybe he had someone to take care of those things for him, someone who took care of him, but that thought was preposterous because the only person who lived with him was Bakura, who was the incarnation of evil and not even a person.

It was half past 1 AM when Ryou put his work away and blinked the tiredness out of his eyes. “You didn’t set up the couch.”

Bakura was sprawled across it. “This is fine.” 

“There’s extra blankets in the closet in the bedroom.” _Their_ bedroom, not the bedroom. “Malik? Do you want to take a shower with me?”

Malik, who had been scrolling through Arabic social media and waiting for Rishid to text him back about this whole situation, was sitting there thinking what a thing to say out loud when Bakura was right there and well within earshot. But it wasn’t like the whole thing of him and Ryou being physically intimate was a secret. And it’s wasn’t like this whole situation was like meeting Ryou’s father, which had similarly embarrassed the hell out of Malik. 

It wasn’t like Bakura was supposed to care, or did care, about he and Ryou being wet and naked in the same small space. They, he and Bakura, had been wet and naked together the last time they were in the same room.

Malik didn’t want Bakura in their bedroom at all, he decided. “I’ll get the blankets.” He headed towards Ryou and didn’t look back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you think it’s, well, weird for Bakura to be here?” Malik asked.

Ryou was already shirtless and brushing his teeth. He looked tired and it made Malik take out his bun, run a hand through his hair. With his hair down, Ryou looked exactly the way he did when Malik fantasized about him when jerking off and _fuck_ Malik really didn’t want to lose him. 

“I mean, it’s weird for him to exist at all,” Ryou said after he spit in the sink. “Are you okay about him staying here?”

In the mirror, they made eye contact and Malik realized that it wasn’t just Bakura who needed to stay here because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Ryou needed him here, for reasons he hadn’t made clear to Malik. Ryou never looked soft and never pleaded, but he wasn’t putting a wall up in that moment. He was asking Malik to be okay with this.

Malik could be okay with this. If this was something Ryou needed, then he could learn to live with the monster in his head in his living room.

“It’s okay,” he said, and helped Ryou with his pants when he looked unsure. “But you know about us right?”

“What do you mean?”

The water was warm and Ryou’s close proximity familiar. “Well, we kind of had a thing.” Bullshit. Everyone and their mother knew that Bakura had broken Malik’s heart.

“I know,” said Ryou. “I was there.”

And that was precisely the thing that Malik couldn’t get his head wrapped around.

Ryou was there, all that time, even the night Bakura almost drove him crazy biting him so hard on the neck that he actually drew blood on Kaiba’s blimp, and it was Malik’s entire sexual awakening laid out for Ryou to see. And Malik didn’t know the first thing about Ryou, not at the time, about what was going on in his head between the two of _them_.

“What was it like?” He asked, because this was something he could never ask before, because bringing Bakura up was always like digging himself into an anxious rut and now the elephant was in the room so why the hell not?

Ryou slid in close and rinsed his hair. “Stop hogging the water. You mean, being haunted?” 

What a romantic way of putting it. It made Malik think of hungry ghosts, and Ra, and karma. “I guess.”

“About the same as anything, probably,” was Ryou’s answer and it didn’t make any sense. Malik offered to wash Ryou’s hair instead of asking for clarification. “Is it okay if I sleep on the couch tonight?” Ryou asked and Malik’s hands stopped moving.

“What?”

Ryou turned around to rinse, then put his arms around Malik, turned them so that Malik was in the water. He lathered Malik’s loofah in soap and started with his shoulders. “You can say no.”

_Are you doing this because you miss him? Because I am_ , Malik remembered Ryou saying, even though that wasn’t really it. The memory was skewed but he wasn’t sure how. 

He didn’t make Ryou happy, but Malik was a great swallower of pain. He could put up with slow, normative heartbreak.

“No, it’s fine.” 

Ryou was washing his legs and knelt down to do so. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Ryou washed Malik’s cock, and he looked good enough down there on his knees that Malik was already half hard. “Do you want to get off?”

They stayed there until the hot water ran out and, by then, Malik felt safer about going to bed alone, if not completely at peace with it. The day had exhausted him enough for him to fall into bed, still a little drunk on the situations he had found himself in, the things Bakura coming back up brought up, just the very fact that Bakura was in fact back and in the living room sleeping with Malik’s boyfriend just then.

In the middle of the night, Malik tiptoed towards the ajar door and saw them there, laying next to each other. They hadn’t slept and Ryou was whispering to Bakura, who had his head propped up with one hand.

Whatever Ryou was saying, he was speaking in a candid way. He was talking, sentences long, and Bakura would cut in at times to ask him questions. At times, it seemed like Ryou was explaining something not for Bakura’s sake but for his own. He sounded honest, vulnerable, and it was wonderful. 

Malik had never heard him speak that way.

Malik couldn’t see Ryou’s face but Bakura’s was relaxed and patient. He could see their hands and they were playing a casual game, one where Bakura would softly touch the back of Ryou’s hand, holding it for as long as possible before Ryou flipped his over and tried to slap Bakura’s hand before he could pull away. It was a game of reflex, instinct, and touch—an intimate game.

They played together, and this seemed incredible to Malik who had assumed that living with Bakura inside your head must have had been so traumatic you could never talk about it, ever.

At one point, Bakura said something and Ryou laughed, really laughed, loud enough that he had to cover his mouth and, still, they didn’t notice him looking because they were so invested in each other. It was then that Malik had to slip away and leave the doorway for his own bed, where he looked at his hands and flexed them together, wondering how he felt about their emptiness.

 


	2. every word out of your mouth is a lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone is fucking with Malik. Malik pov.

There was that time from before Malik had moved in, when Ryou still commuted from a smaller place far from the city center, when it was too early or too late. All Malik remembered was that he’d meant to say they were out of onions and couldn’t find the right word in Japanese in his vocabulary, kept remembering the word for leek, which wasn’t he meant to refer to and didn’t catch himself before he used the Akkadian word for it.

Ryou just wrote _tamanegi_ on an envelope he was using as a shopping list while Malik stared.

“Do you...?” It made the deep part of Malik’s stomach yearn for a homesickness he didn’t know he had.

“Oh,” Ryou had looked partially affected. “Well, we had to communicate somehow. When I first got the Ring. I mean, before he learned Japanese.”

The fact that Ryou knew bits and pieces of not Arabic but of the Akkadian that no one but Malik and his family spoke was stowed away after that day, and they would run into this only sometimes. When Ryou visited Ishizu and Rishid, they couldn’t pretend to talk around him in their secret language like they did sometimes. When Ishizu asked Malik to put his cigarette out and accidentally said the sharp order in their childhood tongue, Ryou told her wryly that it was his own bad influence and sacrificed a pack of Seven Stars to her control.

Yuugi had never learned the pharaoh’s language. Malik kept forgetting that the story of what had happened fell in different places when looked at from another person’s perspective. Ryou and Bakura had a vastly different relationship than Yuugi and Atem, or was it the same?

The morning after Bakura reappeared into their lives, Malik threw his back out again. It was an ongoing problem and a working hazard and happened when he suffered stress.

“It’s your back again?” Ryou was on the couch, which was still pulled out, partially dressed and it caused the monster in Malik’s chest pain to know that Bakura could see him like this, that Ryou would allow it, even though that would never make sense and Ryou was never one for preserving the sanctity of his body, least of all from demons who had lived inside him for years. Malik nodded, ducked away for an Advil, and found Bakura in the bathroom.

“Where does it hurt?” Bakura put his hands against Malik’s shoulders and tensing up send dull spasms up his neck.

Malik swallowed two pills. “Uh, upper back.”

“I could give you a massage.”

Somehow, the prospect of having Bakura’s hands on Malik’s body made his entire neck and shoulder region freeze in uncomfortable pain. But it could be nice. And it could cause significantly bigger problems than Malik had the emotional intelligence for.

Ryou, who was dressed and putting on his socks at that point, had apparently heard. “You should let him. He’s good at it.” Then, he was off to his stress producing, sociopathic finance job that he spend most of his time and energy on.

Malik faced Bakura, who still looked delicious and unconsumable. “Okay. If you think it’ll help.”

What Malik remembered was rough hands, but that was back in Ryou’s body and maybe he was getting mixed up with the past years of living and sleeping with Ryou, but he didn’t have a single memory of Bakura being gentle. “Lay down,” Bakura said and guided Malik facedown where he could smell the familiar parts and the unfamiliar parts of Ryou’s pillow.

It turned out that Bakura really did know what he was doing. “Do you lift a lot of heavy objects?” He asked when Malik winced at a particularly tender spot.

“Just for work.” Shelving auto parts on high shelves in a cramped garage was a bitch.

“There’s ways to do that without fucking up your back.” Who knew? Bakura the chiropractor was here and feeling around on Malik’s back. “Take your shirt off.” And Bakura had gone off somewhere.

Malik didn’t take his shirt off. Bakura came back with the bottle of massage oil from the bathroom cabinet, which sometimes Ryou used on him when the condition got really bad.

“That’s kind of a lot,” Malik told him. To take on, he meant, though he wasn’t sure if the point of that got across despite the communication skills he’d been working on in therapy. Bakura was still wearing Ryou’s clothes, and they looked good on him. He had a masculinity that Malik couldn’t risk attraction to. That long hair, coupled with that the long scar, made Bakura look like a wild thing. He had a hard life, before he had died and after, an. This showed on his muscled frame and defaced skin.

It had been hard to see that on Bakura when he was just a ghost animating Ryou’s body. It was harder back then to remember that Bakura’s propensity towards murder was only evidence of ancient pain.

“Does it bother you?” Bakura asked and moved closer. He didn’t smell like Ryou anymore, had his own mix of pheromones that Malik registered was on the pillow he’d just had his face in. “That you’re attracted to me? I see you looking, you know. And so does he.”

The idea that Ryou could see Malik check out his childhood ghost come back to life just felt like bad luck somehow. 

“Do you really love him?” Bakura asked and it was hard to remember why Malik had pegged this face as gentle just a moment ago, “Or are the two of you just trauma bonded?”

He had no right to say something like this to Malik’s face. He wasn’t anything to them anymore, not to Malik. He was a stranger who just happened to know all of their scariest fantasies, who just happened to have starred in them on account of being a gorgeous and dangerous demon. If Malik and Ryou were trauma bonded, then the trauma himself was holding a bottle of massage oil and grinning at Malik like he was going to eat him right now.

“Fuck you,” Malik spat and realized to his relief that he was really angry, not defensive. Bakura‘s face flushed with pleasure. 

“I thought you lost your edge, tomb-keeper. You’re better looking when you’re alive and kicking than dead faced and catatonic.”

“Stop it,” Malik said. “You don’t have the right to say something like that. You can’t just come back in here and...” Malik didn’t know how to finish that because he wasn’t sure what Bakura was here to do, exactly. He looked up at the demon towering over him in fear.

Bakura didn’t look like a demon, not anymore. He looked like a regular man, who had lived through too much. He had beautiful eyes, one cut in half, and a tremendous jawline.

“I’ll tell you what I told Ryou,” he said. “I can either stay or leave. That’s all I can really do. Which do you prefer?”

That seemed a little too black and white to be true, but Malik couldn’t exactly argue with that logic, could never argue with the thief even back then. He nodded. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Bakura said and this really took Malik off guard. “Does your back feel better?”

Malik adjusted a shoulder, testing. “A little.”  

When Bakura made a motion, Malik followed the implied instructions and slipped out of his t-shirt. It was only chilly for a moment before Bakura was kneading circles against his skin with the warming oil. Involuntarily, Malik sighed and was relieved that it wasn’t a groan.

This was intimate, but it didn’t remind Malik of their time spent biting at each other and promising to save one another in one breath, then sabotaging each other the next. This was a new type of intimacy. 

“We could get to know each other again,” Bakura said and that actually sounded promising instead of threatening. Malik bit the inside of a cheek.

“Okay,” he finally said. Then, “if you want some help picking out clothes, I can meet you after my shift.”

Bakura combed his fingers through Malik’s hair and even that felt good. “Sure,” he said and, “It’s a date.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

They met at a train station and it took a little too long for them to find each other in the afternoon traffic. Bakura wasn’t tall, Malik realized, like he imagined when he first came face to face with him. He was wearing a jacket kept from Ryou’s teenaged years and sweats.

“Those are my pants,” was the first thing Malik said to him.

“I’ll give them back.” There was an expression on Bakura’s face that was difficult to place until moments later, when Malik realized that he just looked happy to see him. 

Shopping for a demon was hard, but not harder than one might expect. They got lost in subcultural indie shops, full of pastel goth and fake punk before Malik had a strike of inspiration and led them to Uniqlo. Bland clothes for the Everyman. They needed something to make a Bakura stand out less, after all, and not more. He was already getting too many stares, even wading around Harajuku teens with bleached hair and face tattoos.

“I like this cartoon,” said Bakura, picking up a Dragonball shirt. “Ryou was obsessed when he was a kid.”

Malik was getting used to feeling incredulous. “You watched Dragonball?”

“Detective Conan too.” 

It felt so normal that Malik almost didn’t catch the part about the timeline being off. “You mean, when he was in high school, right?”

Bakura was looking for socks. “Well, by then, his tastes were more esoteric.” 

Yuugi had received the puzzle when he was already in high school, and somehow Malik had just assumed that Ryou’s life story was the same but now he was realizing that he didn’t know anything about Ryou. Bakura had known him since he was a real child, apparently.

“I didn’t know that you...grew up together.” That was a queer way of putting it.

Bakura looked at Malik and laughed abrasively. “We didn’t grow up together. I raised him.”

Of course, all the hints were there. Ryou didn’t have a parental figure and his father seemed to have forgotten him in Japan for foreign pursuits. He never mentioned any other family members except a dead mother and sister. But to have been _raised_ by your undead spiritual companion? “You _raised_ him?”

After choosing seven pairs of identical socks, Bakura headed towards the underwear aisle. “I did what needed to be done. I mean, the kid just lost his whole family. He was five at the time.”

Before the last twenty four hours, that would have sounded sinister coming from Bakura. Now, Malik was realizing what it probably meant was that for ten years before Battle City, before the Bakura that Malik remembered and didn’t want to, he’d spent ten years doing Ryou’s laundry, cooking him meals, and shopping for groceries. Here was the link between the Ryou Malik knew, the one who forgot to pick up after himself and didn’t eat all his meals without being reminded, and the one his father, the one time Malik met him, had described as “incredibly self sufficient at a very young age.” This was why Ryou, who was most definitely not self sufficient even at his current age, seemed almost infallible on the surface.

“I guess I just assumed that it was more like what happpened with Yuugi,” said Malik.

Bakura gave him a look that made him feel stupid. “Ryou isn’t anything like Yuugi.”

“No,” Malik said and before he could overthink it, “I wouldn’t be this beat up over Yuugi.”

“I’m glad you found each other,” Bakura said abruptly, moving them towards the cash register. “You were always a kind person.”

And that wasn’t how Malik would have described himself as a teen. Maybe it was a possibility now that he was an adult who had done years of therapy and hard self healing. Malik as a teenager was manic, controlling, paranoid, and impulsive. Malik the teenager only had failed relationships defined by his very real and severely debilitating personality disorder. 

“Excuse me?”

Bakura was heading out of the aisles. “I think we’re done here, right? What?”

Malik stammered. “You only picked out two shirts and one pair of pants. I think you’re going to need more than that. But also, I was fucking diabolical when we knew each other.” _I held Ryou hostage_ , he wanted to say, _and used his life as a pawn in a card game hell bent on a self styled revenge that was really just a fit of paranoia_.

Against the clean squares of fabric under stark white lighting, neoliberal styled fascism, Bakura looked crazy with his beat up face and thousand year old eyes with the white eyelashes. “I had soul magic back then. You know that I wouldn’t have gotten close to you if I thought you could hurt my host.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was still midnight and Ryou hadn’t answered Malik’s text, which was a advice animal meme that was really a veiled attempt to get an idea of when he would be coming home. Bakura cooked a stew that tasted to Malik not quite Japanese and slightly of home.

“This almost tastes like...” and Malik almost said “like home” or “like Egypt” but the truth was, he didn’t know home when he saw it. The Egypt he grew up in was a series of basement doors, always closed, and a patriarch who taught all of them the worst kinds of tradition. Malik couldn’t live in war affected Egypt, the tourist’s Egypt, nor the self orientalizing Egypt of today. He didn’t have the vocabulary for it. “Do you miss Egypt?” He asked Bakura, because he didn’t know how else to talk about his perpetual homesickness. 

“I never lived in Egypt,” Bakura told him.

“But, the pharaoh—”

“Wouldn’t have murdered a town in his own empire in cold blood. Kul Elna wasn’t Egypt. We were monsters in their eyes.”

And Malik understood that to some extent. He always identified with monsters and maybe that was why he chose to live in Japan, where exiting the apartment got him heated stares and applying for jobs was a careful navigation of an obstacle course of social norms designed to hurt his chances.

He knew a little of Bakura’s history, however skewed by his father.

“Egypt was at war, wasn’t it? The Assyrian empire was growing.”

Bakura looked like he didn’t want to talk about this right then, but he looked up at the ceiling and put up with it. “We were caught between a phoenix in the south and tiger in the north. We were borderless but borders sometimes cross over, don’t you know? They said we were thieves of culture.”

Caught between two warring tribes, at a time when empire was a new technology—Malik didn’t know how to be a stateless person with nothing to identify with, nowhere to belong now, and he didn’t know how to talk about 1000 BC. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t know much about that history.” It was an invitation. Malik had been schooled, trained, and disciplined by his father’s propaganda but he was asking Bakura to understand that he was willing to hear his version of events. Maybe there was small justice in a lonely act of listening.

Bakura had always looked like a kid pretending to be a demon that he wasn’t in Ryou’s body, but now his gaze had a rich self assurance. He looked timeless. “There’s not much to know. We were already invisible, and my home was a battleground. The Assyrians were vicious and the Egyptians were self righteous. They had their kings and armies and there were only 100 lives in our village.” 

At that moment, Malik had a hunch that everything he’d been saying up to that point had been a lie, and another one that told him that this, too, was a lie. He swallowed the sensation.

“Why didn’t you move? Into Egypt where it was safer? Or Assyria?”

“People didn’t move then. Geography was destiny. Like I said, we were the monsters in their myths. They would have stoned us on entry.”

Malik imagined biblical lands, and the audacity of drifters. He had only romanticized visions of what it meant to swear loyalty upon disloyalty. “What was Kul Elna like?”

The forgotten place, the erased place. The ruin that was never renovated for a tourist eyes because it did not technically exist. 

“I don’t remember,” Bakura said flatly. “I remember my mother as she burned, but I don’t remember her face.”

They let a silence pass through them, because it felt neither uncomfortable nor incorrect. 

“I don’t remember Egypt,” admitted Malik. “I’m only technically Egyptian because I don’t know what it even means to be— But sometimes I remember the way the air smelled, or the texture of a bug, and I feel homesick.” 

From where he sat, cross legged, on the bed that wasn’t a bed and wasn’t his, Bakura again looked diminished. He was smaller than the largest man Malik has ever seen, and he keeps forgetting that. “I only get homesick about Ryou,” he said.

Ryou, his only home. As if a five year old could be an ancient spirit’s home. But now Ryou was an adult and as absent as a ghost.

“I miss Ryou too,” said Malik without making sense. “Even though we live together. Is that crazy?”

Bakura was finished with his food and got up to take it to the sink, picking up Malik’s empty one on his way. “I don’t really know how things work in this world, but his father was the same way.”

But that was the whole thing. Malik didn’t understand how things were supposed to go in this world, and by things he meant relationships and love and work in the twenty first century. He’s certainly adapted with a strong appetite but it’s when Ryou, who is silent and subtle, gets involved that Malik loses his bearings. 

Bakura had come back and he didn’t head back to the couch, but came to stand next to Malik, where he became rigid on the kitchen stool, and touched his hair. “He always wanted you.” 

“Who? Me?” said Malik who tried to relax into the gesture. 

And then Bakura leaned down to whisper in Malik’s ear, “Do you think his cock would have gotten hard for you if he didn’t?”

They were talking about the events on Kaiba’s blimp, apparently. That was a lifetime ago and shouldn’t matter now but somehow, they contained a kernel of truth that Malik had been able to successfully dodge before this moment in time.

“That was you,” he reminded Bakura, gently, and took his hand out of his hair to examine. It looked real and human, with lines on the palm and Malik tried to read his fate in those. “You wanted me. Not him.”

“I don’t know how to say this, but I wouldn’t have been able to take over his body and desires like that, not without permission. No one uses Ryou and gets away with it. I made sure of that when I taught him how to be a person.” 

It didn’t make sense to Malik, because he remembering his own split consciousness like a body snatch, with gaps of memory untouched because they were too dense to unpack. Like oil spills in the dessert. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m saying,” said Bakura, taking Malik’s hand and leading him up, “That you started off fucking the both of us, that we did everything together, that we learned to synchronize. There wasn’t me being in control or him being in control. We had to equally surrender to the other for it to work.” Sitting down on the couch, Bakura pulled Malik between his legs and held his hands. “And I’m saying that we only learned how to be half a person with each other.” 

There was a word for that and it was called codependency. But now, Bakura had his own body and it was warm against Malik’s skin.

“You can touch me,” said Bakura and still Malik wasn’t sure. 

“I should talk to Ryou,” he swallowed, looking at how Bakura’s body looked in clothes that fit him, “If we’re going to get intimate.” He didn’t say “again” because this was different. This wasn’t like before, where screwing Bakura was screwing Ryou and there wasn’t air to breathe in between. This was letting Bakura hold his hands while Ryou was at work.

And Bakura kissed the back of Malik’s hand without breaking eye contact. “Sure. I’ll be here when you need me.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the phone, Ryou sounded distant. “Hey, is everything okay?”

This was then, this was Malik constantly anticipating the arrival of Ryou at home every night and trying to hard to cover it up that it just made everything worse. Malik was the clingy partner, but he could tell sometimes that Ryou didn’t mean for him to be and that he felt badly about it at times.

“Bakura just made a move on me,” he said like he wasn’t worried about it. 

There was a moment’s pause. “Was it unwelcome?”

No, it wasn’t unwelcome. It was highly anticipated, ever since Malik opened the door and saw Bakura standing out there. It was ever since they met in Battle City and Malik wondered what it would be like to have this boy’s unadulterated attention, but maybe he was getting confused again. “No, it was kind of nice. I mean, unless you think it’s totally weird.” 

There was no immediate response from the other end again and Malik heard shuffling sounds that indicated Ryou leaving his desk for a corner where he wouldn’t be overheard. “You should sleep with him,” he finally heard. “I want you to.”

This raised a question that was maybe just Malik’s self doubt and envy speaking. “Did you tell him to?”

“What?”

“Did you tell him to sleep with me?” Because Malik was lonely and it showed, because he was insecure about having needs that Ryou felt he could not fulfill in the relationship and Ryou was going to pass him off to this person who walked into their lives.

“Yes. I did.”

Malik was stunned.

“Malik?”

“I’m still here.”

“Are you angry with me?”

Yes, it just so happened that Malik was angry. He was angry with Ryou for orchestrating this whole thing and not giving him even a wink of a hint. He wanted to ask whether it was Ryou’s intention to fuck with his head and then some or if he had some other goal in place. “No.”

There were voices on the line, like a crowd of people walking by. Ryou stayed silent until they passed. “Look, I can’t talk here. I’ll head home in fifteen. Is there anything you want me to pick up from outside?”

Malik stared at the closed bedroom door. His heart was breaking and he didn’t understand why it was happening. He had questions, about what Ryou spent all of last night talking to Bakura about, about just what kind of hell Bakura was dragged out of, about why he was dropped back into their lives at this point in time, and about whether Ryou acted like a fucking born psychopath for entertainment value or some other bullshit reason. 

“No,” he said. “Just get home safe.”

 

 

* * *

 

  

When Malik made the decision to move to Japan, he had fully expected Rishid to offer to come without consulting him. When Rishid didn’t offer, Malik didn’t talk to him for days.

Ishizu called him and demanded an apology. “I don’t know what you did but you need to make up for it.”

Malik had protested that it wasn’t his problem, that he’d just been busy while secretly thinking that this time next month he would be in Japan and that it wouldn’t matter whether Rishid was talking to him or not. 

“Malik,” Ishizu said, “Don’t you think you’ve caused him enough heartache?”

Of course he had, Malik wanted to scream. But he was sick of encounters with his family ending in a screaming match and tears. He’d learned to shut down instead, which wasn’t any healthier but used up less emotional energy. 

“I’m tired,” Ishizu went on. “I’m tired of being the one to hold this family together. You need to call him. I don’t care about it takes. When you move to Japan, if you’re still going, you’re still going to need your brother.”

Malik never made that phone call, just waited for the heat of the moment to pass, and resumed a texting relationship with Rishid that made it almost seem like nothing had happened.

 

 

* * *

 

They didn’t talk about it. Ryou dragged himself into bed around 3 AM. Malik hadn’t slept but was pretending to. He had planned on not letting Ryou touch him but Ryou didn’t even move once he dropped into bed so there wasn’t any point. Then, he fell asleep at some point and Ryou was already gone. There was a text in his phone that was Ryou telling him he had a company outing that night and to not wait up for him.

Ryou had taken his pack of cigarettes, which he did when he forgot to buy his own, so Malik had a glass of water instead and tried to not think about it.

He was late for work and got in ten minutes after he wasmeant to clock in. It wasa dead end job with no real consequences but his boss had a timetable of resentments and his pay got docked. Instead of taking lunch, Malik had a soft drink. He hadn’t smoked all day. It made him feel itchy but he was also glad for the distraction.

Bakura wasn’t home when he woke up. He didn’t check to see if he’d even stayed the night. Malik wondered how he passed the time between then and his first collision with a school girl in Kabukicho. He wonders if that story is even true, but feels that it is.

He wondered if this was the beginning of his loneliness, which he’s always felt entitled to since Battle City, which he never received on account of his family and Ryou.

Somewhere back in the last night, back in the bedroom, Malik left his anger but he found it again when he walked through the door and saw Bakura with six bags of chips and a pack of Yakults. “Where were you?” He asked.

Devious, Bakura gulps half a bottle of watery yogurt down. “Out.”

“I mean, where were you before you were came here?” 

Back then, Bakura ate like he couldn’t taste food. Now, he licked his lips experimentally. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“A tourist, European, took me to his hotel. Ugly. When he left town, it was a high class escort who was so very lonely. I stole from one of them. Want to guess which one?” Bakura always had a perverse sense of justice and never had Malik been less interested in hearing more about it.

“I meant before that.”

“Oh,” said Bakura, turning to face Malik now. “You want to know about hell.”

Against his instincts, Malik came closer and dug his fingers in Bakura’s hair. It was softer than it looked, like how Ryou‘s was rougher and thicker than it looked. But Malik didn’t want to think about Ryou right then. “Tell me.” 

“Hell is a place on Earth,” Bakura teased, “Without you.” Thinking about Ryou some more, Malik tried his poker face out and held his tongue. Eyes twinkling, Bakura went on. “It didn’t burn,” he said. “There was just nothing. I didn’t see my loved ones. Or maybe I am now and this is hell. Ma’at’s scales are a series of tricks and levers and I wasn’t sure where I was for the first few days of being here. You standing here, pulling my hair, you might be one of her tricks too, for all I know.”

It was nebulous, and nonsensical, but it would have to do. “How did you figure out that you were really back? That you weren’t still dead?”

The answer was more banal than Malik expected. “I saw a mobile phone. Figured technological revolutions were for the living.”

“Would you have come back?” Malik asked, “If she didn’t bring you back?” They were speaking in allegories and tongues but Malik wanted to hear it straight from the devil’s mouth, however many religious icons he mixed together in his head to justify his emotional narrative. 

“I told you I was homesick,” Bakura said and Malik kissed him. His mouth was hot and breath sweet from the Yakult.

“I’m still not convinced you’re good for us,” said Malik when they pulled away. “Ryou has his own goals now. Separate from you. You don’t belong in this time period and you don’t have a real life here.”

The scar on Bakura’s face twisted as the corner of his mouth curled up. “Ryou has his own goals, separate from you,” he parroted. “You don’t belong here and you don’t have a real life apart from him.”

Malik was staring his worst nightmare in the face. He shoved Bakura until his head, laughing, hit the couch.

“Come on, tombkeeper,” He goaded and it was an invitation with his thighs catching and squeezing around Malik’s hips. 

“Why did he tell you to sleep with me?”

“Did you ask him?”

Malik didn’t say anything and gripped the inside of Bakura’s thighs, feeling and testing.  

“Maybe he thought you needed some practice, huh?” said Bakura with a shit eating expression. “Maybe it’s a trap. Maybe he wants to see if you’ll actually do it, what would happen if I teased you just the right amount. Maybe he wants me to satisfy you because he doesn’t feel like doing it anymore.”

That was it. All commute, Malik imagined coming back here and taking what he wanted from Bakura, Ryou be damned. If Ryou wanted them to fuck and didn’t care about how Malik felt about it, he’d just have to show the two of them exactly how he did feel about it. But with Bakura this cruel, all Malik wanted to do was go to his room and shut the door.

He pulled Bakura’s legs off from around him and stalked away without a look back.

* * *

Malik considered the possibility of calling Ryou but it made him sick to his stomach. He wrote a text saying that they needed to talk and deleted it. Then, he called Rishid.

“Malik?”

“Hey,” said Malik and hoped that he didn’t sound as broken up as he felt. “Sorry, it is late over there?”

“Uh, no. It’s 10 AM.”

“Oh.” 

“How’s Tokyo?”

Stable, sturdy Rishid. Self sacrificing Rishid. Malik couldn’t face him because facing him was facing his own selfishness and his own need to be resented. “Bright blue clear skies. It’s chilly here. Ryou’s birthday was about a week ago.” He didn’t deserve Malik calling him out of the blue, without any investment into his emotional welfare over the years, and dumping all his problems on him.

“Ishizu says hi. She turned your room into a study, but kept the bed. There’s room here for you anytime you want to visit.”

And Malik could, he could run away from Tokyo and Ryou and Bakura just like he ran away from Egypt and Ishizu and Rishid.

“We got a cat,” continued Rishid. “But we haven’t named it yet.” Malik forgets, that they never learned to talk growing up and that this is an important life skill. 

“Can you send me a picture?”

“Yes.” Yes, without the master bit. It felt comfortable and unfamiliar.

“Hey Rishid,” said Malik. He swallowed. “I wanted to apologize. If you’ll take it.”

“Malik—“ The beginning of a protest, of Rishid making his excuses for everyone’s bad behavior but his own.

“No, hear me out. This is...honest.” Rishid didn’t interrupt again and Malik swallowed air for courage before continuing. “I haven’t treated you fairly and that’s pretty obvious. I grew up expecting you to take the fall for me on everything, and I took advantage of that. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it now, but I wanted to get it out, at least, out in the open.”

And it felt good, out in the open air. Malik let his breath out and he was still breathing.

“I know,” said Rishid. Malik switched the phone from one ear to another.

“I still had to say it, even if you knew.”

“I know,” said Rishid again and there was a smile in his voice.

“So,” Malik continued, relieved that this was getting easier, “I can’t promise that I won’t be a total fuck up again in the future but if I am, I won’t become a total monster if you call me out on it.”

Monster—the monster in Malik’s chest that he clutched so dearly, afraid of it breaking loose. Monsters were what hid in Rings and Rods, coming back to bind you with shame.

“That’s fair,” said Rishid and, “I accept your apology.”

That was all that Malik needed to hear, he supposed, and he’d put it off for years and years until shame controlled him and removed the speech from his tongue. The day seemed warmer, less stark. 

“Thanks,” he said dumbly. “Send me a picture of the cat, right?”

“Yes,” said Rishid. “Of course.”

* * *

In the middle of the night, a noise in the living room woke Malik and he didn’t feel like jumping out of his warm, dry bed until he heard the familiar sound of retching. When he came out, he saw Ryou collapsed over the bed of the couch and Bakura holding him up and over the trash can.

The company outings always sent Ryou home ill and catatonic the next day. Malik filled a glass of water in the sink.

“Here,” he offered to Ryou and watched Bakura clean up his face with his sleeve.

“Tripped over the end of the bed,” said Bakura, pointing his chin at where Ryou’s foot was trapped under the pulled out couch, ankle twisted slightly, “And hit his head on the table.” 

Drunk, Ryou pressed his face against Bakura’s neck. “It feels so good to have you like this. You better not fucking leave again.”

Malik almost turned away to leave them alone but Bakura grabbed his hand firmly. “Help him with his shoes.”

Ryou’s shoes were heavy, his feet and ankles familiar. Malik had held them like this more times than he could count.

“I’ll get him in bed,” said Bakura, stretching one of Ryou’s arms over his shoulder, to which Ryou immediately moaned in what seemed to Malik like protest.

“I think he wants to stay here.” Ryou’s foot, sneaky, snaked around Malik’s ankle and sent him falling over their legs.

“Stay here,” repeated Bakura and made space between their bodies for Malik to wedge himself into. Ryou’s skin was feverish and his arms sloppy, elbows jabbing Malik hard in the gut. Bakura held him steady, reached over, and smoothed Ryou’s messy hair from Malik’s face. “Let’s take turns sleeping,” slurred Bakura, making Malik notice that, contrary to his own prior belief, he was not the only one in the room who wasn’t quite lucid.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In Anzu’s body, Malik had felt fucking immobile. That had been the first time, looking at what he still thought of then as Bakura’s sleeping face that he began to feel badly about the sense of collapse that had held onto him since waking up and realizing that Rishid was going to have to bury his father. Ryou’s face, Malik began to associate with guilt and he remembered, briefly, that he hadn’t said goodbye to Ishizu before he stole Rishid from her life.

That night, Malik knew that he was condemned to be alone. Then, Bakura, who was always at his throat, rose to sit up like a dead man in front of him.

“What do you want me to do?” he’d asked, chin pushed up in the air and eyes quietly laughing at Malik’s misfortune, and offered a single face up palm.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the last part in Malik’s PoV...  
> Next two chapters will be Ryou’s perspective, then Bakura’s.  
> I appreciate anyone reading this because the story haunted me for a long time.  
> <3


	3. i’m the graveyard you can’t make a profit off of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryou’s POV. Things get a little nasty.

Puberty, for Ryou, was like folding yourself into an origami creature so thin no one could tell your insides from your outsides. No one but he knew what it was like to look in the mirror and see two people.

He would get hard and Bakura would mastubate for him. That, he never told anyone.

I want you I want you I wantyouIwantyouwantyouwantyou, he remembered repeating in his head until Bakura finally gave in and wrapped his own hand around Ryou’s neck and pressed his fingernails in. His eyes would bulge from the pressure and he’d still want more. Sadomasochistic freak.

Ryou was angry as a child, angry as a teen. Bakura suffered the worst of it. Ryou would scream at him and call him names in his sleep. He would have dirty dreams about Bakura skinning him alive, gouging his eyes, and fucking his skull. Bakura couldn’t blame him because where did he get these images from in the first place? Somewhere, at some point, a thief in the night did all the macabre things Ryou was haunted by in fits of despair and glee. Having Bakura in his head was bad for Ryou. Bakura couldn’t blame Ryou for being traumatized by himself.

When things got really bad, Ryou crossed the street in the middle of mildly busy intersections and let himself collapse. Bakura never let him fall, but he hated the way he asked for attention.

They were truly fucked and they everything about each other but had no way of communicating, just let their will over the body ( _the body!)_ fall when the other needed it the most.

 

 

* * *

 

 

At dawn, Ryou woke by habit and poured himself a glass of water. He crawled over Bakura and Malik’s legs, curled with his limbs arranged under himself like a puppy, and went back to sleep at their feet. Sometime late morning, Malik kicked him in the face. 

“Shit! Sorry.”

“It’s alright. I think I deserve it,” Ryou heard himself say and Bakura laugh. Someone slapped Ryou on the ass and Bakura was already out of bed, grinning and leaning over him. He tied up the trash and covered the vomit on the floor with paper towels.

Malik, clear eyed, was laying on his side looking at Ryou. “Hi,” he said.

Ryou swallowed, his voice rough. “Hi.”

“Why did you tell him to sleep with me?” asked Malik, like it had been on his mind all night.

Ryou blinked slowly, once then times. “Did he play mind games with you?” Then, at Bakura, “Did you play mind games with him?”

“What do you think?” said Bakura lazily, washing his hands.

Whenever Malik got angry, Ryou refrained from calling him out on it because he knew that Malik didn’t like admitting to it. It would only cause more problems. The signs were all there that morning, along with a slightly stiff jaw and hurt expression.

God, Malik was beautiful. Ryou loved him in blurred eyeliner, light irises almost inhuman.

“I told him not to play mind games with you,” said Ryou, like it was an apology.

“That’s not what I asked.” Malik’s cheek twitched and he really was pissed.

“I thought—“ It was too early for this. Ryou’s hangover made his head feel too hot and too cold in turn, like he’d gotten too much sleep the night before when he knew that it was the opposite, that he hadn’t slept enough for nearly six years now. “I thought that it would be hot.” There was half a glass of water on the coffee table and he reached for it now.

“Excuse me?”

Ryou peered at Malik over the rim of the cup. “You don’t agree?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

_But I can see that I’ve hurt you now and, for that, I’m sorry_. Ryou had always been a dick. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He could go to the company now and close a couple of contracts by midnight. Bad deals done in the heat of the moment, other people’s money divided up according to risk value, and there were never any consequences for people like Ryou. Only backstabbers waiting for him to let his guard down, only he was always the better player.

Bakura had come over to press his face against Ryou’s cheek. “What he means is, he knew that it was insensitive but he thought that you’d have gotten over it by now. Live in his head long enough and you’d figure out how he thinks too.” Ryou didn’t say anything to that because, really, it was true. 

At least, at the end of the day, Ryou was always honest. It wasn’t his problem if no one saw him for it, if people constantly misjudged him as a doe eyed and soft-hearted little thing. Pity that it helped his career.

“Did you want to talk about it?” asked Ryou. “I can ask you questions, like if you want him on his knees and whether you want me to watch.”

Malik glared, so Ryou, self destructive, went on. Sometimes he remembered that he’d learned how to talk like Bakura, annoying and fatal.

“How do you want him? Be as explicit as possible, if you actually want it to happen. Like, I’ll even give you an example. I want him to tie me down and choke me while you jerk off on my face.” Ryou said that last part slow and deliberate and licked his lips while watching Malik in his discomfort, reveling in it. “See? It’s really not hard to say these things.” Fuck, he was really fucked in the head. Screwed up and over, just an unright specimen of a human being. Dirt, worse than an animal.

The Adam’s apple on Malik’s throat moved as he gulped. “I want—” he whispered.

Ryou drew a line across his thigh, relieved that he was playing along. But Malik usually did play along. “Mm-hm?”

“I want him inside me. On top of me,” Malik finally admitted. Ryou scrambled for something to say right then before Bakura could cut in and announce that Malik’s fantasies were unimaginative and boring. The two of them had spent a lifetime playing their games and Malik wasn’t in practice. The point of this was to drive Malik mad with lust, not to embarrass him without due.

“That’s nice,” was all Ryou could think of and he could feel Bakura sneering down his neck even in the kitchen, because he’s learned to guess these things for more than a decade.

When Bakura came back, he was equipped with breakfast and rope—everything they needed to start their very unhealthy morning. Ryou wanted to smoke, but he’d finished his cigarettes at the restaurant. 

Bakura watched Malik as he ate his sunny side up eggs, took Ryou’s plate when he was done, and grabbed him by the hair, jerking him off balance wildly. Malik’s gaze burned a hole through Ryou and he missed a breath.

“Get on your knees,” Bakura whispered in his ear. “Grab your elbows.” The rope thrilled Ryou, even over his long sleeved shirt. “We’ll do yours first and then I’ll fuck him the way he likes it.”

Then, Ryou was tossed away, bound, just the way he wanted it while Bakura kissed Malik’s knees and thighs and stomach and undid the drawstring of his pants with his teeth. Malik had the perfect body, the perfect face, but Ryou didn’t want to ruin it or swallow it, like some men did. He just wanted to stand on the sidelines and watch it grow old.

They kissed, Malik wide eyed and hesitant, barely daring but daring, and Bakura carnal. “Touch yourself,” Bakura said.

Ryou loved watching Malik stroke himself, fingers light and precum slick. He knew that Malik needed more lubrication to really get going.

“Spit on him,” he said.

“Shut the fuck up,” laughed Bakura but went down on Malik’s cock, tongue out and eyelashes turned down. 

They didn’t even look at Ryou until Malik was breathless and Bakura had moved behind Ryou to pull his hair roughly until he struggled to wiggle into Bakura’s lap fast enough for it to stop hurting. With Malik, he took his hand and guided him over, eyes looking down to his groin, lips sneering, eyes looking back up and _never on Ryou_ , until Malik was straddling Ryou’s stomach, hand still on his cock.

Bakura pressed his thumb deep into Ryou’s mouth, fingers tight around his chin, messily without really even looking, until he gagged. “You can come now,” he told Malik.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was such a shame that Malik always beat himself up over his controlling streak. Ryou had fallen for him when he was a cult leader, when he was wild with his own power. Malik had been a dictator and Ryou loved watching him fall.

He loved watching him and Bakura together from an intimate perspective. Sometimes, when Bakura was laughing against Malik’s skin or chewing his lower lip, Ryou would feel it and Bakura would let him touch the curve of Malik’s bicep or rub his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Malik never knew the difference and Ryou rejoiced in his own invisibility.

But Malik would never treat Ryou the way he treated Bakura. He caressed Ryou tenderly and kissed his shoulders like he was precious.

“Do I make you happy?” Malik had asked him and Ryou was instantly thinking of all the sadistic things he could say in response, the way he did whenever anyone showed him an ounce of vulnerability. Growing up with Bakura in his head did this to him. Their conversations were always the most fiendish games of who could hurt the other more, and Ryou sometimes forgot that not everyone derived pleasure from being abandoned. 

If Bakura had asked that, Ryou would know that the correct response would have been to ask how anyone so deeply unhappy could make someone else happy, to which Bakura would reply that Ryou was a piece of shit for calling the kettle black, and they would both laugh, hysterical, about how incredibly depressed they both were until Ryou got a headache and remembered that Bakura was gone.

Ryou grew up playing games. He made a living playing games. Malik was too fragile for him to play his games with.

What Bakura taught Ryou to do was read between the lines, which was a survival skill and not a love language. When Malik asked if he made Ryou happy, all Ryou could hear was the pronouncement that he did not, in fact, make Malik very happy. He made him afraid and insecure.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“There’s lube in our bedroom,” Ryou said and licked his upper lip for a taste of Malik’s come.

“I’ll get it,” said Malik. For the moment he was gone, Ryou wondered whether Bakura would wipe his face for him, but all he got was a harsh shove in the back that pushed his face against the back of the couch.

“What if you don’t get to watch?” asked Bakura and it sent a shiver down Ryou’s back.

Barely used and discarded—it made Ryou almost delirious. 

Ryou heard Malik sigh as Bakura prepared him, hear him moan at the first entry, and listened to him yell as he was fucked, at an incredible angle it seemed. He focused on the ache in his chest and swallowed it when Malik came with a whimper. By the end of it, his hands were numb, and in his stomach was a deep and sour yearning.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Why didn’t you come back right away?” asked Ryou the first night Bakura was back, huddled together and too excited to sleep. He’d known he’d made Malik feel abandoned and the guilt twisted his stomach.

“I was afraid of you.”

“You’re lying.”

Bakura looked away. “I’m not.” He was and he wanted Ryou to know it, that he was afraid of something and that was hurting Ryou again, but he knew that Ryou would never admit to being hurt and Ryou knew this too. This was alright and good. Safe, if anything.

“What are you going to do now that you’re here?” Ryou imagined Bakura hunting Yuugi down but that seemed superfluous, and if he had the same obsessions he wouldn’t have wasted so much time, or would he? Bakura always meandered around his goals. He imagined Bakura getting a diploma, or working a job. He couldn’t imagine Bakura with twenty first century goals.

“I figured,” said Bakura, “that I’d come here and let you use me, any way you want. I used your body, so you use mine. Whatever you want. I can be your toy, if you still want me.”

This was what power felt like, what Ryou saw people drive themselves crazy for. His lips parted, just imagining it. “You only lived inside me for twelve years. Is this offer exact?”

“They were formative years, weren’t they? And I’ve been around for thousands. One of your years is probably worth five of mine.”

“Ten, or a hundred,” said Ryou, doing the math. Ten times twelve was a one hundred and twenty years of a promise to stay by his side. A hundred was infinite.

They wouldn’t talk about factors outside of the promise. That was a basic premise of making a deal. Did it matter that most of Bakura’s promises stayed broken? It just made him almost human.

Bakura laughed and tickled the back of Ryou’s hand. They used to play this game, Bakura controlling one hand and Ryou the other, when they couldn’t sleep at night. “You drive a hard bargain.”

Rusty, Ryou turned his hand over and missed Bakura’s by half a second. He laid it down again, waiting. 

“Anything you’re desperate for me to do?”

This time, Ryou almost caught Bakura, caught his fingertips with his nails. “I’m never desperate.”

“Anything you’d enjoy? Want me to rob a bank for you?”

Ryou was a professional bank robber, by way of dividends and market bets. “I work in finance.” He caught Bakura, palm stinging and leaned over to kiss him on the knuckle. “And don’t play dumb. You know how I want you.” They’d shared memories, consentless, the way Ryou shared his own mobility, so Ryou approached the topic candidly. 

“I thought you were lovestruck.”

“He asked me whether I make him happy.”

“He doesn’t know that you’re—” They switched roles and Bakura trapped Ryou’s hand under his own on the first try. “Trouble?”

“He thinks I exorcised my demons.”

“You’re not very good at this anymore,” pointed out Bakura as he won again. “Maybe you’ve finally cultivated some purity.”

“You were always better than me.” Unbothered, Ryou laid his hand down flat until Bakura covered it. They stared at their joined hands, waiting for the other person to make a move. “He’s different with me than he is with you. He’s become a nice person. I keep thinking that he’s hiding something and I don’t know if that’s just because I’m used to dealing with you or if I’m feeling the ramifications of his shame. Then I go to work and I don’t think about it. We don’t talk about you because he misses you. Missed. He’s afraid of losing me but he already lost you.”

“Sounds like you’re projecting.”

“Anyways, you have to sleep with him.”

“If that’s what you want,” said Bakura and pulled his hand away, Ryou just slightly too slow to grab and pin him down.

He took Bakura’s hand for real this time, outside of the game, and stretched the fingers out, comparing sizes. “Just don’t mess with his head. If you do, I’ll break you.”

Bakura curled his fingers through the gaps between Ryou’s and gripped down hard until his nails made red moon shapes on Ryou’s skin. “I can break your hand right now, but I’m waiting for you to ask me nicely.”

Feeling understood for the first time since high school, Ryou giggled until there were tears in his eyes and he was holding Bakura’s cold palm against his neck.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Are you okay?” Malik asked Ryou, because he wasn’t used to seeing him dirty and wrenched.

“Hm?” Ryou, still in subspace, blinked.

“Here.” Malik came back with a wet towel and dabbed Ryou’s nose, forehead, cheeks.

“Thank you,” Ryou said.

Bakura, against Ryou’s back, was warm. He smelled like sweat and skin. “He’s fine. Let me braid your hair.” He maneuvered Ryou until his weight was on a shoulder because his arms were still bound behind his back.

Malik sat crosslegged and watched them with perplexity. A lock of hair fell in Ryou’s face as Bakura fingercombed it, and Malik pushed it away with a  finger. “That was kind of intense.”

“Sorry I manipulated you,” Ryou told him.

His brow wrinkled, trying to figure it out. “Did you? Really?”

“Well, I made assumptions and schemes.”

Laying down, Malik laid his head down so that his face was inches from Ryou’s, so that they could see each other unrestricted and could watch every emotion animate a look there, and lip here. “I’m not in your head. I can’t read your mind.”

Ryou had an excellent poker face. “I wanted you to feel found, so I made you feel lost.” Behind him, Bakura was being vastly gentle with his hair and his heart strummed with the thought of it.

Malik’s eyes were affectionate and his face was open. When his mouth curled up, it was wry. “You’re talking in riddles again. I don’t care about riddles. I care about you. And you keep hurting me.”

“I was trying to do something nice for you.”

Confusion, so clear on Malik’s eyes and brow, was a relief. “I don’t get it. How do you ever feel safe?”

Instead of echoing the question back, as per Ryou’s first instinct, he bit the tip of his tongue. “Did you at least enjoy it?”

“I guess it’s flattering. If someone cares enough to strategize around your desires, they must feel something towards you, right?” 

It wasn’t the answer that Ryou expected and, coming from Malik, it wasn’t a play for anything. It was an honest assessment of Ryou’s behavior, his staying too late at work, his tendency to think in feedback loops and circles, and his ability to shut off his feelings until they ate his insides.

Again, for the second, or maybe third, time that week, Malik was showing his insecurities at the table. This time, Ryou was not self paranoid about his own propensity towards viciousness. He was loose. Bakura had relieved the tension and reminded him what it meant to be ready. 

They’d been living together all this time not talking about things because neither knew how to listen. 

“I wish I met you before him,” said Ryou, purposefully vague in his choice of pronouns, because he knew that was what Malik wanted to hear.

Malik’s smile, when it broke, was mesmerizing. Ryou wanted to warp it with numb fingers, cold to the touch.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They tied Ryou to the coffee table, a limb against each table leg with the velcro Malik and Ryou bought a year ago and never used. Bakura unbuttoned Ryou’s shirt and Malik kept looking over, then away when Ryou met his gaze. Ryou just thought about how much he needed a shower.

They spoke Akkadian and Ryou relaxed into listening, remembering being five years old and relying on intuition to talk with the voice in his head. The first Japanese word Bakura spoke to him was _yes_. It turned out that Malik’s training was more formal and they disagreed on the use of pronouns. 

There was blatant tension between them, Malik looking at Bakura for as long as he could get away with, and Bakura ignoring his gaze while putting on a show. Malik was showing Bakura how social media worked, stumbling over turning the contemporary vocabulary into ancient meaning, and Bakura looked at his face with eyes that were alive, an expression Ryou recognized. His arm was slung around Malik’s shoulder.

They were so into each other, it was remarkable. Ryou loved seeing it and loved feeling the threat of them slipping away, leaving him immobile and having to pee. 

“Want to order a—“ Malik struggled and ended up using the Japanese word, “Pizza? For dinner?”

Bakura’s hand was wrapped around his inner thigh and the sight made Ryou’s lips part. Remembering him, Malik repeated in question in Japanese and his eyes drew down Ryou’s chest.

“You can use my credit card,” Ryou told them.

Malik was always waiting for Ryou to come home, and Ryou was always waiting for him to leave. Anticipation, meet dread.

When Ryou asked him to move in, just two years ago, they still went out to dinner despite the lethargy of doing so.

“Really?” Malik had sounded incredulous and Ryou understood exactly why. Ryou didn’t give the impression of being overly invested in their relationship once in their two years of seeing each other. Asking Malik to move in was unprecedented for a personality type this absent.

“The new place is nice,” said Ryou, preferring to talk practicalities. “And they gave me an extra set of keys.” As if life decisions were shaped by technical accidents, which they were. “You can have then, whatever you decide.”

He had a sprawling condominium now, under his name, that he barely spent time in. Ryou supposed he never did well on his own. When Bakura died, he didn’t talk to anyone for more than a year.

But he could be alone now, silent and sure of it. He could watch Malik and Bakura fuck and flirt with each other for an extremity, go to his high pressure job, and work himself into an early grave. He smoked a pack a day and was sure he wouldn’t live to fifty. It would probably be a heart attack. What a relief. He was a moth in the wind and these people were the death of him, a bright light only he could find.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would be scared of Ryou if I met him irl!!  
> I’m really realizing that this whole thing is just a portrait in tendershipping, even if I wanted to try thiefshipping and angstshipping. The tendership draw was just too strong for me to overcome and I’m afraid I didn’t do Malik justice. He’s more of a plot device than a real character in here. What makes a character a character versus a trope?
> 
> This fic is also me not knowing what the difference between tendership and gemship anymore. Tk Bakura and spirit Bakura read as the same character to me these days, despite me knowing that technically Zorc is somehow involved. Is it bad that I prefer to ignore Zorc in my headcanon?
> 
> Anyways, I love hearing what people think and getting feedback. All my repressed fandom feelings feel less repressed when I get comments. Please leave me a few words if you feel up to it!


	4. i’m the ghost you never met

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryou POV. A look inside the mind of our favorite cold boy.

Ryou’s father left him when he was five years old. There was no formal divorce procedure. You could hardly separate from your biological child, legally at least, but Ryou had a distinct memory of him packing his bags up and leaving. He’d lost his mother and sister three months before. 

He knew that there was a presence in the house. It wasn’t a coincidence that he’d wake up and the floor would be swept, the glass of juice he spilled the night before on the kitchen counter mopped up. In the afternoons, he tried talking out loud to it and at night he was too scared to do anything but cover himself with blankets. He dreamed that he was his mother and taking care of an empty house.

The sister of his mother, who he hadn’t met, was supposed to take him in but he hid from her when she came by a week later. There was a boy and girl already living at her house and Ryou was her least favorite child in the world. Weekend evenings, she spent on the phone with his father negotiating his expenses. At some point, Ryou bit the girl on the face hard enough to scar and he remembered her screaming and beating him with a spoon.

He must have been a handful, of venom and snakebites. Ryou pitied those who were burdened with the task of trying to arrange him into their lives.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Work, smoke, work more, eat so he isn’t completely lightheaded during the evening meeting, carefully reprimand self in front of boss, ignore rival’s taunts, work some more, emotionally manipulate a subordinate until she’s almost in tears, do nightly research, then go home and crash. In the morning, start over. Boredom made people ruthless and Ryou was in the tiger’s den.

Malik and Bakura were watching an X-men movie when Ryou got home. Bakura was transfixed. He had a laughable innocence around screens and media. Malik had an opinion and was snorting about the fake hieroglyphics.

“No, the mutants are the gods,” Malik was explaining to Bakura. “Like, when the information in your body is distorted. That’s called DNA. I don’t know what it stands for.” He was hysterical about Bakura’s facial expression. “Well, it’s fiction! The Egyptians aren’t even the right color.”

Bakura looked like he was realizing something for the first time. “You’re telling me that these people are supposed to be _Egyptian_?”

To that, Malik laughed until his head, on Bakura’s lap, nearly rolled off. 

“Ryou, come watch with us,” he called, still red faced and smiling.

Ryou started to say that he had a headache but Bakura, with a point to prove, talked over him. “We didn’t have _all this_ but, in my day, we told stories. The girl who spilled the stars, the paralyzed warriors, the monkey and the elephant. You saw it inside your eyelids when you went to sleep at night.”

Instantly, Malik was distracted with a fresh smile. “In your day? I didn’t know you were such an _oyaji_...”

Like a thief, Ryou slipped from their cheer and into the dark bedroom with a glass of water.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The woman who was his mother’s sister locked Ryou in the closet, where he tried to draw blood on his palm with the spikes of his Ring because he was bored. One day, he blacked out and dreamed that she was chasing him around the kitchen with a knife. Then, he realized that he wasn’t dreaming at all and a body that didn’t feel like his own broke her arm.

The family he came from kept their secrets tucked away. Ryou was sent back to live with his father, but only technically.

His aunt had been terrified of him and his father couldn’t stand the sight of him.

When he heard that her landlord was threatening eviction, he rang on a doorbell he never wanted to see again with a ready checkbook. Though she invited him in, she was neither polite nor kind.

“You really learned how to be a person from him, didn’t you?” She asked Ryou. “He was always coming here with his bribery. You’re the same way and you’ll both always be vacuous pieces of shit. As if human lives could be bought with money. You don’t know how much your mother suffered with him. He was a psychopath and a narcissist—I knew that as soon as I met him. I can see now that you can’t help what you are, that you inherited what you are from your father.” 

Ryou kept his smile plastered stiff until his cheeks hurt.

“I’ll take your money,” she said, “as reparations for what you and your family did to mine, but don’t think this makes us even. I don’t forgive you. I’ll never forgive you. You’re a fucking bastard and, when you die, I don’t think that anyone will cry for you.”

With an even hand, Ryou wrote the check. He hesitated at the number and added a zero for her trouble. She didn’t even look at it. 

“Thank you for taking care of me when I was a child.” He bowed, formal and perfect. “I’m sure that it was very difficult for you.” There was absolutely nothing about this encounter she could bring to the relatives like hairs found in a bowl of soup.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In his room, skinny and thirteen, Ryou wrote a suicide letter that was just one word. He had no beneficiaries nor things worth giving. Bakura laughed, said that Ryou reminded him of children spoiled by boredom, and that a hard day’s work would cure his overactive imagination.

 

 

* * *

 

 

During the beginning of living together, Malik was always cleaning and overly apologetic about leaving unpacked suitcases everywhere. 

“I don’t have much stuff,” he kept saying, “It just looks like a lot because it’s everywhere right now.”

They were having sex when Ryou stopped and leaned over to touch Malik’s face. “I liked that eyeliner you used to wear. It made you look like a photograph.” The next morning, Malik had told him with obvious discomfort that he thought it was uber creepy.

Another time, they’d fought over something stupid, about when it was appropriate to play loud music at night, and Ryou asked Malik, in a calm voice, to cut him with a wine opener if he felt that strongly about it. They never talked about that one.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ryou was always forgetting to eat, and Bakura would always forget to drink water. This, he remembered while sipping day old water at his desk and having to pee. They’re split up maintaince of the body before Ryou could remember.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The next day, it was already midnight when Ryou called Malik to tell him that he wouldn’t be coming home that night, that there was some work to do in the office. Around him, the lights were cut and desks empty.

He was such a good liar, even in real time.

“Want to talk to Bakura?” Malik asked and cut out for a moment before he was back with a smile wrapped around his voice. “Say goodnight?”

Ryou hung up the phone.

The streets were empty and the drive to the gay district, where everything was neon, was short. Ryou crumbled up the parking garage ticket in his pocket. Later, he would burn it. 

The love motel was filthy and the boy Ryou found even more so. He was bleached blonde, with a lip piercing and host club fashion sense that grated on Ryou’s nerves. 

“Make it hurt,” Ryou told him, “But don’t leave any marks,” and the hooker grinned, lecherous. He probably thought that Ryou was shacked up with a wife and some kids out in the suburbs and, tragically, the comedic appeal of that did absolutely nothing for Ryou.

Ryou did come home the next day, meticulous about looking just the right amount of harried, like he’d suffered an all nighter. The lights were off when he walked in the door and when his eyes adjusted he saw Malik with his head buried between Bakura’s thighs.

This, he did want to see, but when Bakura saw him watching, his eyes were accusatory. He showed off, squirming under Malik’s mouth, rolling his hips up and making a nasty shape with his mouth, always ready to laugh at Ryou, always ready. A hand came up, Malik’s, to scratch his bare chest and leave red trails across Bakura’s skin.

Ryou swallowed and did nothing else. He watched Bakura orgasm like it was nothing. Malik’s mouth, swollen and obscene, made him want to fade from view.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I don’t want to be that guy,” Malik once told him, which he was always saying when he was laying out the details of his well deserved feelings of insecurity, “But you never seem to want to have sex. And that’s fine! Really, it is. But it made me wonder, just, is there anything wrong?” _With me?_ was what he didn’t say.

Malik deserved someone real in his life, that much Ryou had noticed. He deserved someone front and center, not a hollow ghost of a shell.

“We can have sex right now,” Ryou had answered and that wasn’t the point, not even close. “You can top, if you want.” He threw that out there to distract Malik, because Ryou never let Malik take control, not because he liked having it so much but because he disliked getting messy and preferred to keep most of his clothes on.

“Are you sure?”

The smile Ryou tried on was meant to be reassuring but he remembered that there were times when it could be seen as unsettling. “Of course. I just forget sometimes. Tired.”

The half truth had Malik nodding. “Right.” He stretched out close to Ryou and spread his hand over his stomach. Always, and incredibly, Malik was easy intimacy that Ryou could hardly fathom himself pulling off. He didn’t know how Malik did it, with the ready affection and open displays of empathy. “It was just something I thought I’d bring up. I hope you don’t think I’m insecure.”

“Of course not,” said Ryou, thinking of the hundred ways he had directly caused the said insecurity.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How was work?” Malik breathed into Ryou’s neck, Bakura having slipped out for some mysterious reason. They had the apartment to themselves and Ryou had never seen Malik so happy. If only he wasn’t so certain that it had absolutely nothing to do with him.

“Murder,” smiled Ryou. “I’d like to go to bed early.”

There were a million things that could have been in Malik’s mind when he paused and looked at Ryou. _We never talk anymore_ , _why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?_ , or _Are you avoiding Bakura and I or is this normal behavior because I really can’t tell?_ but all Malik said in actuality was, “Okay. I’ll come lay down with you.”

Malik slept, but Ryou didn’t until he heard the front door open and close. After considering sneaking off and what that would look like, he kissed Malik on an eye until it opened.

“I’m going to the couch. Is that okay?” This was him, thin and unfolding, showing Malik that all he ever had was a well stack house of cards even if he wasn’t quite ready to let it fall just yet.

“Is everything alright?” Malik murmured, half asleep, and opened his eyes fully, concerned. Ryou could guess the next thing he was ready to say. _You can always talk to me, you know_. Except Ryou couldn’t, he never could. He swallowed his feelings and didn’t even think them to himself. “I mean, yes. Go to him.”

This was what progess looked like, maybe. Like Malik knowing that there were edges inside of Ryou and there was someone allowed to touch them, but it wasn’t him.

Ryou grabbed his pillow, because Bakura didn’t sleep with them and found him face down on the pulled on couch. He climbed on top of him and buried his face into the crook of his neck.

“Can you fuck me?” 

For a moment, Bakura didn’t move. “Now?” He asked, maybe because it was late and maybe because they’d never done that before. This was exactly the wrong time to ask for it.

“Please?” Ryou didn’t say please, he never begged. He didn’t believe in it because, in his experience, it never helped his case.

Bakura tried to lift his head and look at Ryou fully but Ryou kept his face firmly anchored in Bakura’s hair. “Are you okay?”

“I’d like you to be inside of me.” Outside, a car screeched past.

“Okay,” said Bakura and Ryou sighed. Carefully to keep his face hidden, Ryou let Bakura out from under him and replaced his head with the pillow, pressed his face in it until he had to tilt his face to breathe. “Did you even bring lube?” 

“I don’t need it.”

“Fuck you.” For a moment, Bakura was gone and then he was back, stroking Ryou’s back.

“I don’t need that,” Ryou said again, meaning both the lubricant and the comfort. “I want it to hurt.” 

Bakura slid his fingers under the waistband of Ryou’s underwear and dug nails into his ass. “And I’m saying no.”

_I thought that you would do anything I wanted_ , Ryou thought about saying. He didn’t because he needed this and there was only so far he could go if he wanted Bakura to accommodate him.

The first finger, slick, was a relief. They didn’t talk for the rest of the time, not when Bakura pulled the finger out and Ryou felt that deep yearning/anticipation, not when Bakura pushed in and Ryou was actually amazed he could get this hard for him, not when Bakura rolled his hips slow enough to burn, and not when Ryou caught his hand and brought it to his mouth to bite. 

It wasn’t great, mind blowing sex. It was careful, constrained, and forced. They were too close together to get a good angle and rhythm going but they were both trembling at the feeling of Bakura inside of Ryou, where he didn’t belong but somehow had become accustomed to existing, in a new and unfashionable way.

“I’m not going to come,” Bakura finally said. “Do you want to?” He reached for Ryou’s cock but was stopped with a head shake.

“Just stay inside,” Ryou made him do, even though it was uncomfortable and sweaty. Again, Bakura tried to see his face and Ryou turned, holding his breath into the pillow. He slept with Bakura’s mouth, hot, against the back of his neck. When he woke, he noticed his soreness with satisfaction. This was a small token he could carry around like a _yen_ in his pocket. 

The sun rose and Ryou could breathe again. He hadn’t all night, it seemed like, and there was a sore at the corner of his lips from dehydration.

“Hey,” he heard and when he turned, Bakura was looking at him with an expression Ryou recognized as love. It terrified him.

He stood up, walked to the bedroom, and dressed for work. When he passed the couch in his way out, he didn’t look.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m so sorry I forgot to update last week!! Life and work got a hold of me.
> 
> I know I meant to update weekly for this, but I want to update Bakura’s POV chapters due to some midnight ponderings and I don’t see a reprieve for myself in the next week when I can possibly sit down and get lost in this verse and I want to do an adequate job, particularly with his relationship with Malik because Malik is a character that I’m still working on getting to know in this writing thing.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who commented <3 I’m replying to you today. Every time I heard from someone and realized that someone out there is sharing my fantasies made my life a little brighter. Fan fiction is such a great coping mechanism for me because it lets us empathize in this way. I appreciate you, anyone who is reading this.
> 
> Ok!! Enough from me! The Bakura chapters are getting posted soon, I just need to do some fine tweaking and no promises on next weekend! But it won’t be too long.
> 
> <3


	5. a mercenary justice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bakura pov part one.

Wandering Tokyo made Bakura realize his own innate boredom. The closer he got to Ryou’s place, the faster claustrophobia descended upon him and the faster his heart rate sped. _His very own heart rate!_

“Take off your clothes,” Ryou told him, the night he came back, as soon as Malik closed the door and they carefully waited for his footsteps to become imperceptible—both of them, habitually on flight and fight mode, were twins for their reactive hearing. 

Ryou didn’t look like he was kidding around and, despite Bakura’s lackadaisical performance, he knew better than to risk it. He pulled his shirt off and gave Ryou a superstar grin.

“All of it.”

There wasn’t any point in subtle shows and subtler hides. Bakura knew that Ryou wasn’t interested. He stepped on the bottoms of the old gym pants he took from the hooker he crashed with’s boyfriend and pulled his underwear, shoes, and socks off.

Ryou appraised his body while Bakura tried to stand still like a specimen. When Ryou came closer, he became interested to know that his breathing did not speed up and nor did goosebumps cover his arms.

There was a large scar across the entirety of Bakura’s chest and they both remembered how he got that one. He held his chin up high as Ryou traced it in neither pride not defiance, but habit. On his back were whiplashes, which Ryou also wanted to see. His legs were in the worst shape, but by then Ryou had seemed satisfied.

“Are you cold?” He asked.

If he was, Bakura hadn’t noticed it. “So, what do you think? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?”

_His dreams!_ Bakura, who carried the trauma of ninety nine dead souls, had no right to allow a small child even the briefest look. And Ryou had gotten the whole story, repeatedly, throughout the course of his tenderest years.

If Ryou was damaged, then Bakura was the damage itself, leeching off his host and turning everything into shit with his bored, old disease.

From behind, Ryou gripped Bakura’s hip and smoothed the skin out with a crass thumb. “I remember this one. It was a fall, wasn’t it?”

Bakura couldn’t stand it when people touched, or even looked at his scars. He let Ryou cover the one with curious fingers and occupied himself by rolling a shoulder. “Who even knows anymore?” he said breezily. When a person became as disfigured as he was, they stopped counting the reasons why. 

“Yes, it was. From when you robbed the scribe, the one whose wife later fell in love with you.”

And wasn’t that a scream? “She wasn’t in love with me,” sneered Bakura.

Ryou hummed and stepped back, interest dissipating. Naked, Bakura stood there and wondered whether it was okay to put his clothes on now, or to turn back around so that he could see what kind of facial expression Ryou had on.

“What do you want to do with me?” He asked.

He could see that Ryou had a life now, a real one, like the living and full blooded person that he was. He owned property, exercised control over certain things, and kept Malik on a tight emotional leash, one that Bakura wasn’t even sure if Ryou was aware of wielding. He had a job, a beautiful apartment, and a beautiful partner.

He had blank walls, which no one had decorated, a killer routine that would someday send him into the crematorium, and emotional detachment skills that he’d learned from an outlaw gone insane.

“There’s really only two options, you know,” Bakura went on, because he’d never learned to shut up. “You can have me leave or you can have me stay.” And maybe that was the whole point of this little exercise in the first place. Ma’at didn’t send him here to play gigolo to hookers and tourists with bad teeth. She sent him here to be useful. Ryou had a decision to make, one that somehow fell through the gaps when he was five years old.

“Not really,” said Ryou and he was farther from Bakura now, who turned and saw that he had chosen the farthest kitchen stool. “There are a lot of other things that I could have you do. I can think of at least five.”

Ryou’s body, Ryou himself really, had advanced. He still had a kicked expression and a downward turned mouth that made him look pitiable, but he was no longer skinny nor fragile, at least in look. If he knew what year it was, Bakura would have tried to count his age.

He grinned stupidly, showing all his flaws, which was the best he could do.

“Go take a shower,” Ryou told him. “You smell like shit perfume. I’ll find you an extra towel and some clothes. And make sure you use my shampoo. You'll know which one.”

 

* * *

 

There were only so many roles Bakura could play, despite his talent for dissipation and squander. With looks like his, there were only so much that was expected, or desired, of him.

The European gentlemen had wanted to tame him. Bakura had that done to him countless times. He sucked dick on his knees, hungry, and asked for a little “pocket money” in the morning with an ingratiating smile. Later, he regretted not leaving with the man’s wallet when he’d had him tied to the bed, but he was out of practice and if life had taught him anything it was that there were an infinite number of chances to play that timeless trick.

The girl, Bakura hardly expected. He never expected the women but indulgently played the bad boy for her. When he robbed her, it was because she desperately wanted it. That play had turned into months. It ended when he looked at the calendar and realized that he had missed Ryou’s birthday.

 

* * *

 

Malik, Bakura genuinely had not expected. He’d always known that Ryou had a thing for him, and that because they shared a heart that skipped in pubescent want, he’d chosen to make an alliance. But Bakura had always been the type of easy ally who ended things by stabbing his partners in the back.

Malik tried to speak to Bakura and he was furious.

When they met, Bakura had hated him. He had spoke of places he’d never seen with proper names—valleys that Bakura had starved in and rivers that he’d been denied. Malik was nobility. It didn’t matter to Bakura whether he experienced that through embarrassment or smugness.

Bakura was thirst. He didn’t experience that in layered stages of laying back and analyzing his emotional options. He experienced that the only way one could—through the uncomplicated and thousand year long process of survival.

“Do you miss Egypt?” Malik asked, using the old name for the empire, and Bakura’s locked jaw hurt him.

_You have to sleep with him_ , Ryou had told him the night before after Bakura had assured him that he had only come here to follow Ryou’s personal orders. Ryou, who didn’t trust him, knew his history and had asked Bakura to prove himself with what he knew he did best.

It was easy, so easy. Malik was the easiest person Bakura had ever met, save for himself, and hadn't they had sex before? It was impossible to tell. Bakura had a premonition that Malik, like the escort, had him typecast as the devil.

“I never lived in Egypt.” They weren’t getting to know each other, no string attached. Bakura’s bored mind always found something to ferment.

_Don’t fuck with his head_ , Ryou had also told him and, now, Bakura could see that he was truly destined to be a fuck up in every scenario. I’ll break you, Ryou had promised and wasn’t that a lie? The only person Ryou knew how to break was himself and he had gotten practice upon practice, because he could only get through to Bakura by pointing knives at his own throat or running in front of speeding cars while tripping over his own ankles.

There had never been a time when Bakura was the type of man who explained himself but this was him in new flesh and new blood, so he created a gap between his words and his thoughts to name his hometown and remind Malik that he’d been born a monster and died a monster.

Here, in Japan, three thousand years after the fact, they talked about what was never written.

“Egypt was at war, wasn’t it? The Assyrian empire was growing.”

_The war!_ Here was Malik, posturing knowledge of war. War was history, waged in the names of kings. War was not knowing why soldiers were raiding your grandmother’s house, why they dragged your mother behind the garden, or where your father was.

Bakura said some poetic things about phoenixes, tigers, borders, and destiny. He wondered if he could take Malik’s wrists and get the thing over and done with already. They tended to like it when he was rough with them. Malik had, when he chased danger. Bakura was a whore, shaped like peril, and attracted the types who were ready to throw themselves off a cliff. He was advanced at making violence look lyrical.

You like seeing me like this, don’t you? Bakura wanted to ask Malik. Pried open so you can see how I tick inside? Do you want to hear about how much I hate you too or is that taking things just a touch too far? Are you more comfortable with vague, myth shaped words?

“What was Kul Elna like?”

_Kul Elna! The gall of him!_ As if Bakura’s world was a circle that began and ended with Kul Elna. As if one could nod and understand him by one name.

Later, Bakura had his revenge on Malik, for daring to hold even just the name in his mouth, for having the audacity to taste it, let alone wonder what it was like. Bakura wielded sex as a weapon. Malik asked Bakura why Ryou toyed with him, and Bakura did have the answers to that one when no one else did. Bakura pounced on the moments he knew would not come back to him to feed Malik’s insecurity complex like a professional.

“Maybe he thought you needed some practice, huh? Maybe it’s a trap. Maybe he wants to see if you’ll actually do it, what would happen if I teased you just the right amount. Maybe he wants me to satisfy you because he doesn’t feel like doing it anymore.”

What look Ryou would give him, once he saw Malik break under the pressure? _Don’t fuck with his head._ Like hell he wouldn’t. As if you could simply tell a headcase to not fuck with another headcase.

At the moment, Malik had changed the topic of the conversation to homesickness. “I only get homesick about Ryou,” said Bakura.

_Like hell he did!_ Bakura didn’t get homesick. He was homesickness, the sentiment itself, unnostalgic, wrathful, and without a point of return.

 

* * *

 

Before Bakura was a tomb robber, he was a common thief and a whore. He prowled the cities asking for gold in just the right tone of voice. Farmers, merchants, and craftsmen traded for him. He wasn’t worth as much as a young female, so Bakura made up the difference by being dishonest. If he didn’t, his master made him regret the difference.

He sold his supposed virginity hundreds of times, and made up poor, little baby sisters that he had to run home to feed. Never mind that his only home was hidden away in the back of a brothel, where he stripped for richer men who looked and touched and chose him or didn’t once he proved himself.

Slave traders followed armies and catastrophe strategically, it turned out, and Bakura was swept into one’s arms at some point during his early life. This, he didn’t remember.

But he did remember his master screaming in his face that he was worthless every time he came back. And Bakura always came back, like a stray dog who liked getting beaten. At some point, that was all it was. He'd learned to work with hunger by then.

And he did remember his first real taste of sadism. There was a new man in town, just passing through in the dead of the night, who picked Bakura.

He’s stood there, barely clothed and the man didn’t look at him. “He’ll do,” he said and, “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” When they were alone, the man asked Bakura, “Do you know why it doesn’t matter? Why I don’t care which one of you I get?” 

Knowing that this man was trouble, Bakura’s smartass mouth had asked, “Because you’re fucking horny?”

There had been a terrible grin on the man’s face. “Because everyone looks the same when they’re crying for someone to save them.”

The next time the man came back, Bakura was ready with a sharpened stick. He was arrested, and they branded him a killer with a gash across the face before throwing him into the desert. There, he learned to solve puzzles and weaponize rage. 

 

* * *

 

Ryou told him to sleep with Malik, so Bakura did. Sex was the thing Bakura was best at, in the end. For days already, Malik had been hard for him and making him come was like snapping flint stone.

He turned Ryou away, so that he wouldn’t see that Bakura kept his clothes on, that he distracted Malik with a tongue in his ear when he tried to pull Bakura’s shirt off, that he didn’t want Malik to look at or touch his scarred body because that was the only thing Bakura could not feel. 

On his hands and knees, Malik was lewd and sensual. He had always been. Bakura fucked him and it felt like nothing, like it always did. He imagined Malik crawling, begging for it, and covering his face with a foot. He imagined forcing him to come in his pants in the center of a crowd. Bakura came and dragged nails across Malik’s asscheeks.

 

* * *

 

Exile didn’t stop Bakura from pulling tricks. He did work for some very bad men. He did murder and treated his body like a commodity. He made money for pimps, ringleaders, and gangsters, dreaming of taking their place.

One of the first villages they raided, riding in on horseback like false heroes, that tried to burn them because they had no weapons. The group Bakura rode with at the time, made up of bandits expelled from civil society, had a stash of machetes they found in a field. 

The fire had captivated Bakura. He’d frozen when a boy came at him with a plow and managed to scrape some of the flesh off his chest.

They didn’t leave any survivors, because they all understood what a mean role surviving was. The bodies, piled up and stinky, reminded Bakura of home.

They didn’t make a killing. The village was poor and it would be onto the next one after the season. The leader of the group, however, gave Bakura his fair share of the loot. He’d seen Bakura cut down the boy, then other faces Bakura still remembered terror distorting, one by one.

“You can join us,” he’d welcomed Bakura, respecting his ability to kill. That had been an offer of a place to belong, which Bakura had hungered for enough for the need to control him. “I can see that you’re a useful man, and we could use a new face.”

_Useful! Bakura had proven himself to be useful!_ Bakura was made to be used. He was a marionette. He let powerful men use him because he felt weak. He killed and stole from those who reminded him of his mother because, finally, it made him feel strong.

Later, he hated the pharaoh because he understood that all his wounds were self inflicted.

 

* * *

 

Bakura braided Ryou’s hair while Malik curled up, close but not touching.

“Sorry I manipulated you,” Ryou said, looking at Malik, and Bakura knew that the words were meant for him. 

So this was how this was going to go, with Ryou telling Malik sweet nothings absolutely loaded for poison for Bakura to hear. Ryou was the master of double meanings and his apology wasn’t really an apology, because it didn’t beg for deliverance.

Once Ryou became accustomed to being haunted, he formed his own opinions over the memories he lived through every night. He, amateur designer of tabletop games and role master, called Bakura a pawn. He’d known all his life that Bakura had a hard on for being used, especially sexually, and Bakura let his strings be pulled because that was the only comfort he understood.

“Did you? Really?”

“Well, I made assumptions and schemes.”

“I’m not in your head. I can’t read your mind.”

Ryou’s hair was tangled in the back, thick and unruly. The way Bakura yanked his fingers through it must have hurt but Ryou didn’t even shudder. The rope had turned his hands pink and, if they were to stay bound any longer, Bakura would have to cut the cords. Touching a finger, he found them cool.

“I wanted you to feel found, so I made you feel lost.” For a moment, Bakura stopped braiding. There was a particularly difficult clump of hair and trying to tame it had resulted it a small chunk tearing off. In his hand, a mess of hair pricked Bakura’s palm and made him feel hot.

He felt used, Bakura thought to himself for the nine thousandth time, by Ryou, by Malik, by the pharaoh, by his enemies, and by the allies that all, inevitably, left him in the dust. Hands wrapped around hair and buried in the back of Ryou’s head, Bakura pulled harder than necessary and Ryou didn’t take his eyes off Malik.

He was angry at Ryou and furious at Malik. But he always obeyed the men he was most angry towards. Ryou knew that.

Malik was speaking, and Bakura noticed that his eyes were tender. “You’re talking in riddles again. I don’t care about riddles. I care about you. And you keeping hurting me.” 

He wondered, what was the point of caring about somebody if you weren’t going to talk around them and attempt to out maneuver one another?

Safely tucked away in rope, Ryou’s hands clenched and unclenched. “I was trying to do something nice for you.”

Something _nice_? Because he knew Bakura’s weak points, because he knew that all Bakura ever looked for was an order, that he had been trained for it and condemned by it, and that he would never, ever say no. 

If Bakura wanted to be controlled, Ryou was showing him just how capable he was of controlling him. If Bakura wanted to be used, here was his golden opportunity. This was a man who had been trained in psychologically manipulating him specifically since he was a young boy by none other than Bakura himself.

On the couch, Malik heard the words and worried about something entirely different. His eyes, unlined, reminded Bakura of seeing the sunrise after committing mass slaughter. “I don’t get it. How do you ever feel safe?”

_Safety!_ The habitually armed part of Bakura was ready to instigate. Only people who could afford to be naive felt safe. Never in his three thousand and change years of living, then dying, living some more, dying again, and whatever the hell this was, had Bakura ever felt safe.

Safety would drown him. He was peril in fantasy form. Bakura was comfortable when falling through the cracks of reality because suicide was the only strategy that gave him a step up over those who had real, systemic power over him. Safety, as far as he was concerned, meant death.

 

* * *

 

Before Ryou got home, Bakura could linger in the apartment if he wanted to see Malik alone. Sometimes he didn’t and walked until the light in the apartment window had turned dark from the outside.

Malik, he didn’t have a crippling sense of responsibility towards. Malik was an aberration in the whole equation, which is why he was so attractive to Bakura and Ryou. They could curl up and put on a movie and talk about plot points without the whole thing turning into a blanketed way of trying to make the other person break open. When Malik set off Bakura’s anger and shame, he did so accidentally and wasn’t waiting to view the reaction with a secret expression.

Quietly, Malik asked Bakura, “Why do you think Ma’at brought you back?” They were watching an American film, dubbed in Arabic, and Bakura had no idea what was going on.

From Ryou, the question would be a trap. Ryou would never use the name Ma’at. Ryou would never ask this in the first place because Ryou thought in banal flat lines with no spiritual feeling.

“The hell would I know? You think she would tell a lowlife like me? It was probably a mistake.”

“It doesn’t feel like a mistake, though,” Malik said against Bakura’s arm.

“Maybe you should ask her. You’re chummy with the gods, aren’t you? I’m not really on your level, huh? I’m just a poor, illiterate thief.”

The gods, Egyptian or Assyrian, were tall monsters who understood only elegant scripts. Bakura had been deceived by the written word too many times and he couldn’t even read.

“You’re talking about my family background,” said Malik. “You hate me for it.” From Ryou, this would have been careful goading. Malik just sounded hurt.

Not knowing what to say, Bakura watched a man’s face turn blue on the television screen. 

Malik wore real gold. He came from real money, from a Ra blessed family with real wealth bequeathed to them by the pharaoh himself. This had always made Bakura uncomfortable, his fingers antsy and plotting an escape route.

His instincts were too old. He was reacting to things that happened a billion years ago, to wars waged by empires that weren’t even in the history books.

“You can hate me,” Malik said. “It’s okay. I get it. Well, I don’t but I hate my upbringing too and I know that’s not the same, but...I know there’s cold blood between us. I can accept that.”

There was nothing between them in the moment. They were tucked together, skin against skin.

“You know my father tortured me, right?” Malik went on. “I’m not trying to say that’s the same as what you went through, but it’s also not better or worse. It doesn’t change what you went through. Fuck, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Bakura didn’t say anything, because personal trauma had been his destination point in his homesickness. Trauma wasn’t weighable. He was thinking that Ma’at was a scale and that he was the aberration. He was beyond god’s judgment, and wasn’t that the ego complex?

And when Malik let him run his hands over his body, that first morning, Bakura had marveled about his easiness, his availability. Bakura was only available as far as sex was concerned, because he was hungry. Malik wanted it all—heart, blood, and breath.

“If you don’t know what you’re talking about, let’s just watch the movie,” said Bakura instead of anything kind.

Malik glared. “Fuck you. I was trying to empathize.”

Anger was what Bakura deserved. There was comfort to anger, because he knew when he had earned it. 

“You and Ryou are the same.”

“I told you that I raised him, didn’t I? Based on knowing him, how would you say I did?” They were face to face now, Bakura aware that his own sneer was what was making Malik’s anger narrowed in distress.

They burst into laughter, because tragedy was comic. Bakura couldn’t tell who was the one to start laughing first.

Malik was okay, because he wasn’t full of traps and tricks. Somehow, he had unlearned them. This was a blessing because he had always been a horrible cheat.

“You’re so full of shit,” said Malik, grabbing his sides and elbows sharp against Bakura’s. “You don't even know what year it is, do you?”

Bakura dwelled well in misery. His optimism was feverish. “That’s what I keep saying. Let’s just watch the fucking movie, if we’re going to watch a fucking movie. What are mutants, by the way?”

 

* * *

 

When Bakura first met Malik, he was on the losing side of an argument with Ryou about whether or not it was appropriate to sleep with older men in order to fill the void of losing his father to apathy. Bakura, a hypocrite, found himself hopelessly triggered. He grabbed onto the first young hot thing he saw.

Later, in the blimp, he’d woken up and found himself having sex that he did not initiate with Malik. Afterwards, Malik buried his head against Bakura's stomach, asking for comfort like he knew he deserved it.

"You make me feel everything that I know I’m not supposed to be feeling," Malik told him, sounding like relief and Bakura cupped the back of his neck, unsure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok sorry I am just posting this now!! Life got hectic and I forgot the joys of fandom. I didn't forget about this fic. I have it completely written and was polishing the narrative logic in this. Also, this chapter is much shorter than the last one just because.
> 
> Also, re-exploring this made me facepalm at how emo it is lol.
> 
> Hope someone is still reading this :) Leave a comment for me please if you are~


	6. hello hello hello goodbye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bakura's pov. final chapter. everyone does some emotional growing (finally). malik and bakura go on a cute date. sexual situations. ryou breaks my heart again.

The kids that Ryou were left with were viscous little things—which was normal for children their age. They had been unconscious of one another at that point. The woman who never looked at Ryou left them alone with a running television and they decided to test Ryou’s limits because they wanted to see how far they could push him.

“I dare you to...” the little girl had paused with a devious expression, “put on mom’s lipstick and sing Princess Princess!”

Bakura overreacted. Neither of them meant to but Ryou had been heartbroken and Bakura saw danger in every turn of phrase and new piece of technology, both material and cultural, in this new world that he didn’t understand. Without knowing what the girl was talking about, he felt Ryou’s heart race, hands sweat, and rose to the occasion.

Years later, he never understood why Ryou never blamed him for the incident. It had life altering consequences and Ryou never had family after that.

“You’re my family now, aren’t you?” Ryou had said out loud in an empty room, not believing it at the time and hoping for it to be true. When Bakura didn’t respond, he took off running into the kitchen and held a knife against his neck. He was fourteen years old and incredibly melodramatic.

Bakura dropped the knife and, without deliberating over it, slapped himself in the face so that Ryou could feel it.

“If you do that again, I’ll cut your Achilles tendons and find a new host. You’ll shit yourself in a locked room for the rest of your life until you die,” Bakura said borrowing Ryou’s mouth.

All Ryou did was pick up the knife and place it in its rightful place in the kitchen drawer. “Thank you,” he said. When Bakura’s stomach turned, he knew Ryou could feel it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the store with Malik, Bakura saw that Malik was, after all this time, still just a child without a mother. At the time, he was obsessed with the task that Ryou had assigned him, and strategized over how to get it done and over with without worrying about consequences.

All his life, Bakura liked taking things one step at a time, one foot over another. Things fell around him but they fell into better positions.

“It was more like I raised him,” Bakura bragged loudly, after making himself seem quaint with a couple of anime references, fully knowing that phrasing things this way would make Malik want to see Bakura was a person he wanted love from. It felt fully disgusting to say. “I mean, the kid just lost his whole family. He was five at the time,” he went on.

_Raised Ryou!_ As if emotionally impairing and traumatizing someone counted as raising them. He was still a fantastic jester, Bakura noticed, and even better at creating riots.

Malik had fallen in, hook, line, and sinker. He wanted to bite, to see Bakura as human when he fully was not. Only Ryou could see that, because he knew who he really was. Ryou was used to seeing Bakura and recognizing him as a person who could only cause pain.

The night he came and buried his face in Bakura hair, Bakura had known what he wanted before he heard it.

“Can you fuck me?”

Well, all his life, Ryou had been getting completely fucked by Bakura, wasn’t he? And now he was here in his very own body, able to put a heartbeat and physical vocabulary to their dynamic. Ryou might as well have said, Can you actually fuck me now and make me feel it, instead of just fucking me over in all aspects of life and committing me to an existence mediated by emotional numbness from the front and back?

What a joke.

Bakura, wide eyed, feigned sleep. “Now?”

Then, Ryou broke his heart again. Ryou, who was always breaking Bakura’s heart, shouldn’t have the capacity to do it any more than he already had. “Please?” he asked. 

When Ryou was a child, he begged Bakura for attention and love all the time. He never got it. He learned, by the time he hit twelve, to never ask, to never beg, and, most importantly, to never cry.

Bakura wanted to see his face, because he knew that, in that moment, looking at Ryou would make him cry. Ryou, well prepared, hid his face with a pillow.

“Okay,” he agreed because he owed this to Ryou. He owed everything to Ryou, because he had let him take him body and agency and life. Because he never complained nor hated Bakura over infecting him with paranoia, hate, and desperation because he was a kid and latching onto something was the only thing he had. 

Ryou never felt love, because Bakura had trained him to be a sociopath, and he was still ready to take Bakura in.

“Did you even bring lube?”

“I don’t need it,” said Ryou because he had become addicted to the pain he expected from Bakura, because Bakura was the person who hurt him and Ryou’s way of dealing with that was to turn to him, smiling, and ask for just a little more, please.

“Fuck you.”

Running his hands over Ryou’s body felt uncanny. He’d spent half a lifetime in this body, but it had grown without him.

It didn’t feel good. Nothing between the two of them did anymore, because they were sick of each other and who they were around each other. Halfway through it, Bakura wondered about trying to look at Ryou again, but he didn’t feel capable of pushing a new boundary after he’d already violated all the old ones.

If Ryou wanted to have his line, so be it. Bakura didn’t need to see him cry again, not from this side of thing. He could just hold him and slide in and out of him, letting him clench his teeth around his hand. If he wanted to scar Bakura, Bakura would let him. He deserved it. He would do whatever Ryou asked of him because it was the least he could do.

He remembered being inside Ryou, feeling his hunger and forgetting his thirst.

He fell asleep at some point, buried to the hilt, and Ryou wrapped in his arms. When he woke, he opened his eyes and realized that Ryou was exhausted.

Maybe Bakura was the one who had given Ryou his nightmares and caused his lifelong crippling pain. Maybe he had traumatized the fuck out of him.

Maybe he was still in Ryou’s life, and completely incapacitated over what he could do about it. Bakura hurt Ryou, and this was just like a formula, but he loved him and he didn’t hurt him because he loved him but despite.

He reached for Ryou but he was already getting up. Bakura wanted to grab him and pull him close but didn’t. The only thing he had left to give, now, was space and that was a thing unseen.

 

 

* * *

 

 

As a child, Bakura taught Ryou to steal from the grocery store when the woman wasn’t looking. He taught him to keep his chin up and to avoid unnecessary bodily movements when telling a tall tale. He taught him to suspect anyone who showed him a modicum of interest and keep them the fuck out by turning into ice.

At his old school, a typical bully, a girl with a cult following of other girls, who wasn’t pretty or well off or enviable in any way, gave Ryou too much attention. She probably had a crush and showed it by teasing him for his hair and avoidant personality.

During lunch, she had commented on, very loud, the fact that Ryou always ate white rice, alone, and never spoke to anyone. It was bait, designed to get him to blush and come speak to her.

Bakura decided that she needed to be punished and that the only way was to show her exactly what happened to young children with sexual appetites.

Against Ryou’s wishes, Bakura baited an older man with her photo. He accepted 300,000¥ for his trouble. He made Ryou write the note about meeting him in a warehouse in the middle of the night.

The week that she stopped showing up for school, Ryou ignored him and, whenever he felt Bakura move an arm or hand, punished it by jamming a pencil knife into it. That was the extent of rage Ryou would show him. He was always eager to make himself bleed.

The last time he did it, arm skinny and cut open, Bakura asked him whether he wanted to get raped too.

“Sure,” said Ryou and loosened his body. He fell to the floor because, that time, Bakura did nothing.

They never talked about Bakura’s acts of cruelty because Ryou knew exactly where it come from. He’d watched Bakura get split open and spat on. He’d felt the come stick to the roof of his mouth and knew exactly what it felt like to lay there thinking of everything except the state of affairs and what one would do if revenge could be orchestrated with a knife.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Hell was nice at first, a respite from being dead. Then, Bakura started remembering things and it became thousands of years of self punishment.

His memories were always impeccable. He always remembered every word said and every face seen. In hell, he indulged and wished for hunger and thirst.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There were always a couple of hours between Malik getting home and Ryou getting home or not. During the day, Bakura wandered and avoided the trains because he could never figure them out.

On an impulse, he grabbed an advertisement and tucked it in his back pocket.

“I’ve never eaten this,” Bakura told Malik, holding up the flyer, when he walked in the door, still in his jacket and windswept.

“It’s—“ Malik skimmed the paper, “ _Anmitsu_. You’ve never had _anmitsu_?”

“It looks good.”

“Uh, do you want to go?” asked Malik, without taking his jacket off. “Because I’ll take you, if you do.”

They went on a date because life was boring and Malik was available. The dessert was semi sweet and juicy.

“So,” said Malik, “Are you, well, getting used to Tokyo?”

Bakura shrugged. “All cities are the same.”

“Well, Domino was smaller.”

“Domino wasn’t a city.”

The jelly, translucent was dissolving in a sickly way and Bakura decided he liked this treat. “You know,” Malik cut in, face looking like he was about to say something heartfelt and awkward, “I never apologized. To you.”

Malik was easy because he was direct, except about things he wasn’t aware of and, even then, he approached his unknowingness honestly. When Malik decided to approach things that were off limits, that was when he got less easy. Bakura looked away.

“For what?”

“Well, I killed you,” said Malik and neither of them spoke for a good ten seconds.

Bakura broke down and started to laugh until the entire cafe became distracted by him. “What the hell?”

“I did. In Battle City.”

“Well, I’m not dead so, technically—”

“That doesn’t make it okay. You...” Malik stared at the dessert and out down his spoon. “You were there for me when I needed you and I killed you.”

“Stop saying that you killed me. What the hell are you even talking about?”

Bakura wasn’t “there” for anyone. He was a ghost, sent by hell into the world to sabotage.

“You tried to win my sanity back,” said Malik. “I mean, you didn’t succeed and you didn’t do it right but you tried. You didn’t have to do all that. I…appreciate it.”

This was new, because the reason Bakura hated the nobility was their ideology. They split their world into the black and white and, when something happened outside of their control, they blamed darkness and monsters like Bakura.

“I thought that whole thing was your other personality.”

“My other personality is _me_ ,” stressed Malik, hesitating. “I didn’t think of it like that for a long time, because I was scared of what it would mean if I did all those things, but not looking at it at all made me afraid of a part of myself that I felt I couldn’t own. Like, it was me. I did all those horrible things and I have the capacity, no power, to move on. Or at least keep living.”

Bakura didn’t want to be in this conversation at all, and regretted the whole excursion. “You were traumatized,” he murmured, and ate a large bite of the _anmitsu_.

“You’re always doing that,” said Malik.

“Doing what?”

“Being compassionate,” said Malik, fully believing what he was saying, and this was definitely a conversation Bakura didn’t want to be in, “I think you see yourself as this really bad character and that makes you do all these horrible things, but you do compassionate things for people when they really need it too.”

Around a mouthful of _anmitsu_ , Bakura wet his lips around melted sugar. “Fuck off, Malik.”

“I’m not toying with you!”

“You want to know how compassionate I am?” Bakura asked, knowing that he was going to get carried away. This was him spooking away his last alliance, for a taste of shock value because he just couldn’t stand it when someone didn’t hate him as much as he hated himself. “I put members of Ryou’s family in a coma, I fucked with his head when he was in a state of grief, I ingrained it in him _deeply_ that no one gives you attention without wanting something back in return. I fucked with his head when it was the last thing he needed. I broke his arm because he wanted to join an after school club.”

The rest of it, the killing and the whoring, Bakura didn’t touch. Even enraged, he could only go so far.

“But wasn’t that just you trying to protect him, when you didn’t know how?” asked Malik without missing a beat.

Bakura snarled back. “I don’t need you making excuses for me.”

Just a cross, Malik held his ground. “Apparently, you do. And I’m such an expert at making excuses that my fucking brain blamed all my violent behavior on a made up alter ego! Look, you were traumatized too and sitting inside a gold object for years didn’t make it better. I’m sure that Ryou understands—“

“Ryou understands?” Bakura was done here. “Oh, I’m sure he understands that me abusing him for years from the inside of his fucking skull along with every other authority figure in his life was just something that happened because I couldn’t help it.”

“That’s not what I mean to say,” said Malik, softer. 

“Fuck you, Malik,” said Bakura. “You don’t get to talk about this.”

The look Malik gave him was helpless. “Then who does? Neither of you know how to talk to each other.”

And that was true. Bakura knew how to throw taunts and run head first into self destructive behavior. Ryou knew how to block things out until he’d left himself out of his very own life. Neither of them knew how to break a silence without hurting the other one.

“I’m just saying,” Malik went on, “I see you do things for him, things you don’t even realize and he doesn’t realize because you’re both so used to each other. You pick up after him, you cook for him, you clean up his messes, Bakura—“

“And you’re saying,” Bakura ridiculed, sarcastic, “that all will be forgiven if we just have a conversation about it? We lived in each other’s heads, Malik. We don’t need to talk about anything.” Or, Bakura lived in Ryou’s, rather, and watched his own masochism play out before his eyes with fresh and modern consequences.

Fuck. Bakura toyed with his spoon and bit his tongue inside his mouth.

“No,” protested Malik. “I’m saying that it’s just obvious that you care about him, and he cares about you. Even if you hurt each other. It’s like what you said. You took care of him and that shows.”

I did what needed to be done, Bakura had told Malik some night in a store dishonestly. “I know where you’re getting that from but I was lying when I told you,” he said, because Malik wasn’t getting it. “I knew you were emotionally vulnerable, so I tailored my words to the situation. You could say that I did what needed to be done.”

"I know you were," said Malik flatly, eyebrow arched and face blank. “I mean, I’m not as emotionally gullible as the two of you think I am, even if I don’t play into your games, you know. I’m just saying now, after the fact, that it doesn't matter.”

Bakura didn’t want to avert his gaze, but he really didn’t want to look at Malik either. 

“I’m not saying that you’re not cruel,” said Malik. “Maybe you are, I’m sure that you are. I’m just saying that, at least from where I stand, you’re compassionate too. You don’t have to beat yourself up over it, not because you don’t deserve it, but because there’s no point. You're not an _equation_ , like Ma’at scales. I don’t any of the priests really knew her so it’s up to us to figure out why she let you back here, in the world, right? It’s up to you to choose compassion now, even if you truly, _truly_ believe that you're a piece of shit.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

_Weren’t you going to weigh my heart? Cut it out of me like goat in the marketplace and throw it on your—_

She was divine and weightless, Bakura remembered. She played with him, not because she didn't know what to do, but because she saw the merit in waiting to do it. She looked like change of heart except that she didn’t.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Since Bakura was dropped in Tokyo, he never entered Ryou and Malik’s bedroom. There had been afternoons where he thought about going in and looking through drawers for evidences of nothing but his feet never took him inside. He was a robber of the dead, not of the living.

He wasn’t stupid. He could see Malik dodging the need for him to go in at every opportunity. He was quick to retrieve clothing and sheets from the bedroom, as soon as they needed something, before Bakura could get up and go looking in there unsupervised. Ryou either didn’t care or didn’t feel capable of enforcing boundaries, because he’d never been allowed them.

Bakura wasn’t here to cross any lines. He’d done enough of that in all his past lives. He kept himself contained to the common spaces and never challenged a closed door.

“Are you going to bed?” Malik asked when he saw Bakura lounging on the couch. Bakura never did put the couch away during the days, even though Ryou asked him to.

He knew why Ryou asked him to. He wanted Bakura to put it away everyday, because he didn’t want to have to do it himself if Bakura disappeared again. He didn’t want Bakura to leave a single trace of himself here.

For the most part, Bakura kept out of Ryou’s personal spaces and tried to comply. He couldn’t help that the biggest violation of all, which was his own sudden and ill fated existence.

“No,” said Bakura. “Why would I? It’s early.” He was tired and, when he was tired, he couldn’t sleep.

“Oh. I just wanted to say that you should come sleep in the bedroom tonight, if you’re going to bed,” said Malik. “If you want to. The bed is big enough for three.”

Bakura watched him with care. “You want me to go in there?”

Red, Malik tried a smile. “Yes?”

Trying to shake off the feeling that this was a trap, Bakura got up and waited for Malik to take the first step.

The bedroom was large, with a window that reached from the ceiling to the floor. The sheets were white and, except a nightstand, there was no other furniture.

“You guys don’t really decorate, do you?” said Bakura, walking around.

“Well, all my stuff is in Egypt and Ryou…”

Ryou was a blank man with an empty personality.

Ignoring the part about Ryou, which couldn’t be helped, Bakura asked, “What do you mean? Haven’t been you been here for years?”

“I—“ Bakura turned and saw Malik looking at his room too, in realization. “I guess it hadn’t sunk in yet.”

“Hm.” Bakura sat on the bed crosslegged and wondered which side Malik took, which side Ryou slept.

“I’m going to take a shower,” said Malik. “Then I’m going to bed. You don’t have to stay here, if you’re not tired or just want to sleep on the couch—“

“I’ll be here,” said Bakura.

 

 

* * *

 

 

After his shower, Malik smelled like cinnamon. He wore nothing but a towel. The room was bright and fluorescent and Bakura could see everything about him.

“Come closer,” he said when he could see that Malik wasn’t sure and slipped his hands under the towel. They kissed, wet and slow, water from Malik’s hair stinging Bakura’s eyes. When Malik was naked, hard against his thigh, Bakura traced his hip with a thumb. “I don’t really use sex in the best way,” he told Malik.

“We don’t have to have sex.”

Bakura swallowed and pulled Malik forward, leaning back until he was laying down and Malik was on top of him, one leg hanging off the bed and the other folded next to Bakura’s waist. 

Malik was beautiful. “I want to.”

The front door opened and they heard Ryou hang his coat up.

When Ryou came and saw the two of them together, he had that vastly unimpressed look on his face that suggested any number of reactions. Bakura realized that he could walk out of the apartment right then and leave without coming back.

“Ryou,” he said, because he never called Ryou by name. It was pet name after pet name, and Ryou was not his pet. “Can you come here?”

Ryou didn’t move. “Why should I?”

Someone had to make a sacrifice, to take a step of vulnerability, and it didn’t matter, truly, did it? Because they hurt each other regardless of how high their walls grew.

“Because I need you.”

There was a moment that felt like an hour and then Ryou moved to the bed, circling it to crawl on from the other side where Bakura couldn’t see him without arching his neck. He held a hand against Bakura’s face, like he was checking his temperature, and leaned over him to kiss Malik.

“What are you doing with my boyfriend?” Ryou asked, forehead still leaning against Malik’s.

Bakura could have said, whatever you want like a good boy but instead he said, “Getting to know him better,” and, “Kiss me too.”

Ryou ignored him and looked at him, holding eye contact, for an extended period of time instead. Bakura let him, hesitant, strip him of his shirt and then he let Malik notice the long scar down his chest, from the village boy who struck him with a plow.

“Tell him where I got it,” Bakura said when he noticed that everyone in the room noticed the curiosity in Malik’s stare.

Ryou looked at the old wound but didn’t touch it. “I remember fire, and flashbacks,” he said. “He came at you with a farming tool and you hit him with a knife. It was murder, in cold blood. You were in the wrong,” he told Bakura, looking at him unsympathetically. “You were the aggressor, that time.”

It wasn’t the whole story, not even close. For that, Bakura was grateful and looked for Ryou’s hand with his, found it, and held it.

When Malik found the gouge on Bakura’s hip, he tried to trace it and Ryou slapped his hand out of the way. ”Don’t touch. You can look.”

The order made Bakura tremble, which Ryou didn’t miss. This wasn’t possessiveness, or control. This was knowing that there were some things Bakura couldn’t stand and choosing to protect him, when he was someone completely unworthy of protection.

“What’s it from?” Malik wanted to know, examining the indentation.

“A stray dog,” shrugged Ryou.

“What about these?” He meant Bakura’s legs, which were cut up.

Ryou avoided eye contact from Bakura. “Mistakes.” 

Bakura’s body was a carcass, hot and breathing— _alive!_ —under Malik’s inspection. He was laid for all to see. He leaned his cheek against Ryou’s cool lap, grateful for Ryou’s nose for obfuscated storytelling. When Malik touched along his hipbones, Bakura felt both struck and open. He sighed.

He used to think that Ryou looked more like himself everyday. Now, Ryou was older than he had ever been allowed to grow.

Malik’s cock was wet against his stomach so Bakura put a hand against his hip, and another on himself. Unsure, Malik looked to Ryou. “He’s desperate for you,” Ryou said and even that was masochism inviting him in. "Are you going to let him have you?”

And Bakura was. He was hard, straining, and loose. Ryou understood him and he understood sex. But when Malik looked up, his hunger was for Ryou.

He grabbed Ryou by the neck, pulled their mouths together, and whispered feverishly through their hair, "I want you to have everything you want. Anything you want.”

Bakura held his breath. Then, instead of pulling away, Ryou just looked afraid.

Bakura could laugh then, he really could. He could taunt them and ask whether they really thought they could find joy in each other when he's been through hell and back and that was where they were all going at the end of their boring lives. He could insert himself, too old and condemned, into their dynamic and remind Ryou that he didn't choose happiness all those years ago, or he could get up and leave, reminding Ryou that nothing he felt was ever enduring or appropriate.

He took Ryou's hands with both of his instead, overkill, and laid it over his heart.

When his gaze followed, Ryou didn’t will all the fear out of his face before meeting Bakura’s eyes, at least not immediately. Then, he bent down, tucked hair smooth under his ear, and kissed Bakura again upside-down.

He tasted bitter, like he smoked too much and led an unhealthy lifestyle. Bakura wanted to deepen the kiss, which felt teenaged with shy lips and no tongue, but he didn’t dare ask for more than what Ryou gave him. 

“I'm been good, right?" Bakura asked, suddenly feeling the urge to ask Ryou for forgiveness. "Since I’ve been back?” He’d done everything that Ryou had asked of him since he'd come back, except speak the right way and pull the couch up during the day. Ma’at’s feather, it turned out, was a black hole and her scales were unstable equations of gravitational pull.

The corner of Ryou’s mouth turned up but it wasn't a smirk. He pressed it against Bakura's mouth again but it wasn’t a kiss.

"I don't really care about things like that," he said and bit Bakura’s cheek.

Bakura kissed him, deep and violent, with his arms thrown around Ryou’s back and knocking the wind out of him. Ryou’s shoulders, boney, made him feel frailer than he was in Bakura’s arms. His arms, folded carelessly, jabbed elbows into Bakura’s heart. Holding Ryou hurt.

“I’ve got you,” Bakura said into his hair. “I’ve finally fucking caught you, finally, finally, _finally_ …Don’t you _fucking_ leave, you’re _mine_.”

Ryou was laughing, recklessly with his mouth wide, into his chest. It made it impossible for Bakura to breathe.

“Shut up,” he told Bakura when he was done, still smiling. “Go away and lay back on the pillows for a second.”

Ryou looked Malik, half naked and still damp from his shower, up and down lewdly before cupping his face and kissing him. The way they did it was disgusting, tongues out in the open, saliva everywhere, and Ryou’s hands all over Malik’s chest. Bakura swallowed as he watched.

Watching Bakura watch him, Ryou slid one finger, vertical like an arrow, against Malik’s skin where the towel was tucked into itself until it fell away. He got down to his hands and knees, then, and gave Malik the sloppiest and loudest blow job Bakura had ever seen. When he was done, Ryou’s lips shone with spit and come. His eyes were wet and his hair was a mess. 

“Fuck,” said Malik and Ryou came up to wrap a hand around the back of his neck.

“Suck him off,” Ryou told Malik, guiding him down by the neck towards Bakura just when Bakura thought he’d forgotten him. Malik panted at Bakura’s cock.

“Yes, _sir_ ,” he said, putting a tongue in his cheek and making eye contact with Bakura.

Malik sucked hard, bobbing his head up and down quickly. It made Bakura’s stomach catch and his hands look for something to hold. He felt at risk of something impossible.

“Ryou,” he said again. It was the second time in two un-whole lifetimes that he’s said Ryou’s name out loud. Ryou looked at Bakura, waiting, while he stretched his hand out. “Please.”

When Ryou came closer it was hesitant at first but, then, Bakura grabbed his ass with both hands and pulled him in to bite at the zipper on his pants, his stomach—anything he could get before Ryou would, inevitably, slink away. Ryou pulled his head back by a fistful of hair and slapped him, _hard_ , on the face.

He waited for Bakura to get his bearings and look up before patting him, against, lightly where he’d hit him. “Do it properly.”

Malik started using his hand with his mouth and Bakura’s breath hitched before he realized what Ryou had said and undid his pants as fast as he could, adjusting him so that he straddled Bakura’s chest with one hand against the wall and another in Bakura’s hair.

Bakura kissed everywhere he could reach on Ryou’s stomach, hungry and feverish, willing him to not change his mind about this the whole time, and sucked his breath in, smelling Ryou, before he curled his lips around his teeth and took just the head in, lightly. 

He knew Ryou’s cock so well. He could flick his tongue against the underside, wrap his hands around the base before swirling around the head. 

Ryou always loved it when someone was hurting him. He loved it especially when he never broke character, when nothing on his face revealed his emotions and when he didn’t even have to clench his jaw to exercise such good self control. What Ryou never, ever let anyone do to him was make him feel good. That’s why Bakura was such a threat to his psyche, along with everything else. 

“I want to make you feel so good. I can, you know. I know everything about you,” Bakura panted as a fast promise, feeling as though he were seeing a cat expose its underside and that he wouldn’t know whether the whole thing was a trap until he stuck a hand into the fur.

Ryou laughed again. “So fucking do it.”

Everything Bakura did to Ryou was tender and soft. He licked up and down his cock and sucked gently on his balls before he stuck his tongue out as far out as it would go and blew Ryou like that, eyes tilted up and watching him. Between his legs, Malik made a loop with his fingers with his index finger and thumb around the base of Bakura’s cock and licked the head like a lollipop.

When Ryou came, he made a sound like Bakura had taken something away from him. It shocked Bakura and made him think of apologizing. Instead, he swallowed everything and held Ryou still as he licked him clean.

Ryou got back on his hand and knees and crawled over to Malik, face still flushed and smiled at Bakura before he kissed Malik, openmouthed, against Bakura’s cock. They licked Bakura together, pushing his cock back and forth between them.

“Oh my god,” said Bakura and tried to buck up but Malik was holding him down. “Just let me come already.”

Malik, laughing, gave way and let Ryou take Bakura in, loosening his grip and pumping Bakura up and down quickly. It was rough and made Bakura whimper. He came into Ryou mouth, biting around his fist.

When Ryou leaned in, Bakura thought it was for a kiss and opened his mouth, eager for affection. Then the corner of Ryou’s mouth went up and he pushed Bakura’s come into his mouth with his tongue. Bakura never liked this, when other men did this to him, but when he swallowed and licked his lips Ryou looked more pleased than Bakura had ever seen him look. 

“You can sleep on the bed,” Ryou said to Bakura, looking at Malik. “Just don’t take up too much room.”

Bakura did take up too much room. He woke up, sprawled out, Malik’s head on his hand and Ryou’s legs interlaced with his. Ryou’s eyes were wide open. The sun had just come up.

“You should have his stuff brought over from Egypt,” was the first thing Bakura thought of when he woke up and saw the blank, white walls around him. Ryou watched him, a peculiar look in his eyes. “It sucks in here. All you have is a bed. It doesn’t feel like people live here.”

Ryou didn’t say anything so Bakura kept talking. “You don’t even have any pictures together. Don’t you spend time with each other outside of here? Why don’t you bring a camera with you next time? I mean, do you even get the chance to do anything except work? Seems like that’s all you’ve done since I’ve—“

Ryou put his hand over Bakura’s mouth and pinched his lips together with his thumb and index finger so tightly it hurt.

“Did you come back just to shit on me and leave?”

Bakura shook his head but Ryou wouldn’t let go, just pressed his lips together tighter and tighter until it felt like a punishment. Not wanting to wake Malik, who was still sleeping on his numb hand, Bakura turned his head away until Ryou had to loosen his grip.

“I came back because I love you, you fucking idiot,” he said, baring his teeth. Ryou looked away. “Look, you don’t have to believe me or say it back or _whatever_. I don’t know. But you have to at least let me say it.”

“Is this the kind of magic where you disappear as soon as you confess your love to me?” asked Ryou, sounding like he was thirteen years old again.

And this question really took Bakura off guard, really made him stop right there and consider where he was, what year it was, and with whom he was talking before he could figure out what it meant. He forgot, because he had taught Ryou to shield himself against his own impulses towards cruelty, that, at the end of the day and despite all his emotional walls and tactics of avoidance, Ryou was so fucking _naive_.

“What? Is that what you’re afraid of?” Bakura wanted to scoff but caught himself before he did. It wouldn’t be a good look, not at that moment. He held his breath, trying to remember what it had been like to be a man who yearned to know what was in store year after year with guarantee. “Look, there’s as much use worrying over whether I’ll be disappeared as…I don’t know, Malik being struck by lightening. We’re mortals, Ryou. When we worry over what only the gods can control—that’s when we get fucked over.” God, he sounded like a scribe educating a team of students. Bakura hated sounding didactic more than anything else.

Ryou was still looking up at the ceiling. “Well, you left me. A lot. When I was really young.”

“Well, I was trying to do that back then. I’m not trying to do that now.” A moment of silence went by and Malik moved in his sleep. Bakura’s hand was still numb and he tried to forget about it. “He’s not either. You should move more of his stuff in.” _Then, you won't have to remember me so much if Ma'at takes me in the night_ , was what he didn't say.

“So promise me,” said Ryou. “That you won’t try to leave.”

With his free hand, Bakura turned Ryou’s head towards him and pressed his forehead against Ryou, creating a hidden and intimate space between their two faces. “I’d marry you if I could. Is that what you want? I’d make myself a spirit again and throw myself back into you if I knew how. I’d sign a blood contract for you.”

Ryou looked at Bakura like he hated him. “I just want you to say that you won’t try to leave me on _purpose_.”

Bakura blinked once, then twice.

“I won’t try to leave you on purpose,” he repeated. 

Very, very slowly, Ryou smiled. “Good.” He brushed Bakura’s hair with his hand and cradled his ear. “Let’s go back to sleep,” he said with finality and closed his eyes. In the cool, dawn light, Bakura watched his eyelids until they stilled with his breathing. On his back, the sun rose slow as hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW. it's honestly been so long since i've finished a fanfiction. this feels like a relief. i started dreaming about this very long ago when i lived in a different apartment than i do now and it's finally done. as usual, i'm a bit embarrassed about this like everything i write.
> 
> i'm hoping to finish some other fics soon (and by soon i mean within this year) before i start anything else. hope you had fun reading this one <333 so much love for anyone who read the whole thing.
> 
> i will continue writing tendership fic forever i think lmaoo. somehow, i'm still so in love with bakurae and their ways.
> 
> xo


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